The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 1137566388, 9781137566386, 1137566396, 9781137566393

Table of contents :
Also by Martin Garrett......Page 7
Contents......Page 8
Series Editors’ Foreword......Page 9
Preface and Acknowledgements......Page 10
2. Other......Page 12
Mary Shelley Chronology......Page 15
‘Address to the Duchess of Angoulême’......Page 17
Alfieri, Vittorio......Page 18
America......Page 19
Ariosto, Ludovico......Page 20
‘Au Revoir’......Page 21
Aziola or aziolo......Page 22
Barbauld, Anna Laetitia......Page 23
Beauclerk, Aubrey......Page 24
Biography......Page 25
Boiardo, Matteo......Page 26
Booth, Isabella Baxter......Page 27
The Bravo; a Venetian Story......Page 28
‘The Bride of Modern Italy’......Page 29
Brontë, Emily......Page 30
‘The Brother and Sister: an Italian Story’......Page 31
Brown, Charles Brockden......Page 32
Bulwer, Edward Lytton......Page 33
Burke, Edmund......Page 34
Byron, George Gordon, Lord......Page 35
‘Byron and Shelley on the Character of Hamlet’......Page 38
Camoens (Camões), Luis Vaz de......Page 39
Carlyle, Thomas......Page 40
Catholicism......Page 41
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de......Page 42
Chiabrera, Gabriello......Page 43
Cicero, Marcus Tullius......Page 44
Clairmont, Clara Mary Jane (Claire)......Page 45
Clarke, Mary Cowden......Page 46
Colburn and Bentley......Page 47
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor......Page 48
Colletta, Pietro......Page 49
Condorcet, Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de......Page 50
Cooke, Thomas Potter......Page 51
‘Correspondence, Maxims and Reflections of Louis XVI’......Page 52
‘Cupid and Psyche’......Page 53
‘Cyrus Fragment’......Page 54
Dante Alighieri......Page 55
‘The Death of Love’......Page 56
Dionigi, Marianna Candidi......Page 57
Disraeli, Benjamin......Page 58
Drawing......Page 59
‘The Dream’......Page 60
Duvillard (Foggi), Elise, or Louise......Page 61
‘An Eighteenth-Century Tale’......Page 62
‘The Elder Son’......Page 63
‘The English in Italy’......Page 64
Este......Page 65
‘Euphrasia: A Tale of Greece’......Page 66
‘The Evil Eye’......Page 67
Falkner. A Novel......Page 69
Contexts and Sources......Page 70
Themes......Page 72
Reception......Page 74
‘The False Rhyme’......Page 75
Feminism......Page 76
Fenwick, Eliza......Page 78
‘Ferdinando Eboli: a Tale’......Page 79
Filicaja, Vincenzo da......Page 80
Foscolo, Ugo......Page 81
France......Page 82
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus......Page 83
Sources......Page 85
Names......Page 88
Composition......Page 89
First Edition and Reviews......Page 91
Second and Third Editions......Page 93
Themes......Page 96
Frankenstein in Film and Television......Page 99
Frankenstein on Stage......Page 101
Frankenstein Novels......Page 103
French Lives......Page 104
Fuseli, Henry......Page 105
Galvani, Luigi......Page 107
Gatteschi, Ferdinando......Page 108
Germany......Page 109
Gisborne, Maria......Page 110
Godwin, Mary Jane......Page 111
Godwin, William......Page 112
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von......Page 114
Goldoni, Carlo......Page 115
Goring, Augusta......Page 116
Gothic......Page 117
Greece......Page 118
Guiccioli, Countess Teresa......Page 119
Hahn-Hahn, Countess Ida von......Page 121
‘Hate’......Page 122
Hazlitt, William......Page 123
‘The Heir of Mondolfo’......Page 124
History of a Six Weeks’ Tour Through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland, with Letters Descriptive of a Sail Round the Lake of Geneva, and of the Glaciers of Chamouni......Page 125
Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus......Page 128
Hogg, Thomas Jefferson......Page 129
Horne, Richard Henry (‘Hengist’)......Page 130
Hunt, (James Henry) Leigh......Page 131
Hunt, Marianne......Page 132
Illustrations of Mary Shelley’s Work......Page 133
‘Illyrian Poems—Feudal Scenes’......Page 135
Ingolstadt......Page 136
‘The Invisible Girl’......Page 137
Italian Lives......Page 138
Italy......Page 139
Japan......Page 141
‘Journal of a Tour in Italy, and also in a part of France and Switzerland’......Page 142
Journals......Page 143
Kean, Edmund......Page 144
The Keepsake......Page 145
Knox, Alexander......Page 146
Lackington, George......Page 147
Lamb, Mary......Page 148
Languages......Page 149
The Last Man......Page 150
Sources......Page 151
Themes and Interpretations......Page 154
Lawrence, James......Page 157
Lawrence, (Sir) William......Page 158
Letters, Mary Shelley’s......Page 159
‘Life of Shelley’......Page 160
Lind, Dr James......Page 161
Literary Lives......Page 162
Lochhead, Liz......Page 163
Lodore......Page 164
Title and Sources......Page 165
Themes and Focus......Page 166
Reviews......Page 169
London......Page 170
Lorenzo de’ Medici......Page 171
The Loves of the Poets......Page 172
Lucretius Carus, Titus......Page 173
Machiavelli, Niccolò......Page 174
Manners-Sutton, Sir Charles and Ellen, Lady......Page 175
Mantell, Gideon......Page 176
Marshall, Florence Ashton (Mrs Julian Marshall)......Page 177
‘Mason, Mrs’......Page 178
Mathilda......Page 179
Sources and Intertexts......Page 180
Biographical Aspects......Page 182
Themes......Page 183
‘Maurice or the Fisher’s Cot. A Tale’......Page 184
Mazzini, Giuseppe......Page 185
Melville, Herman......Page 186
Mengaldo, Cavaliere Angelo......Page 187
Metastasio, Pietro......Page 188
Midas: A Drama in Two Acts......Page 189
Milton, John......Page 192
Mirabeau, Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de......Page 193
‘Modern Italy’......Page 194
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de......Page 195
Moon......Page 196
Moore, Thomas......Page 197
‘The Mortal Immortal: a Tale’......Page 198
‘The Mourner’......Page 200
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus......Page 201
Music......Page 202
Napoleon Bonaparte......Page 204
‘Necessity of a Belief in the Heathen Mythology to a Christian, The’......Page 205
‘A Night Scene’......Page 206
Norton, Caroline......Page 207
Novello, Vincent......Page 208
Ollier, Charles......Page 209
‘Orpheus’......Page 210
Oxford......Page 211
Paganini, Nicolò......Page 213
Painting and Sculpture......Page 214
‘The Parvenue’......Page 215
Pasta, Giuditta......Page 216
Peacock, Thomas Love......Page 217
Pellico, Silvio......Page 218
Perkin Warbeck......Page 219
Sources......Page 220
Themes and Focuses......Page 222
Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca)......Page 224
‘The Pilgrims’......Page 225
Plato......Page 226
The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley......Page 227
‘The Pole’......Page 228
Politics......Page 229
Portugal......Page 231
Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein......Page 232
Prometheus......Page 233
Proserpine: A Drama in Two Acts......Page 234
Putney......Page 237
Quevedo y Villegas, Francisco Gómez de......Page 238
Radcliffe, Ann......Page 239
Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843......Page 240
Reading......Page 244
‘Relation of the Death of the Family of the Cenci’......Page 245
Religion......Page 246
‘Review of the Italian Novelists’......Page 247
Robinson family......Page 248
Rochefoucauld, François, Duc de La......Page 249
‘Roger Dodsworth: the Reanimated Englishman’......Page 250
Roland, Marie-Jeanne ‘Manon’......Page 251
Romanticism......Page 252
Rome......Page 253
Rossetti, Lucy Madox......Page 254
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques......Page 255
Russia......Page 256
Sanford Family......Page 258
Science......Page 259
Science Fiction......Page 261
Scotland......Page 262
Severn, Joseph......Page 263
Sgricci, Tommaso......Page 264
Shelley, Harriet Westbrook......Page 265
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft......Page 266
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, in Fiction......Page 271
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, in Film and Television......Page 272
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft: Portraits and Other Visual Representations......Page 273
Shelley, Percy Bysshe......Page 275
Shelley, Sir Percy Florence......Page 277
Sismondi, Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde de......Page 278
‘The Sisters of Albano’......Page 279
Smith, O.......Page 280
‘The Smuggler and his Family’......Page 281
Southey, Robert......Page 282
Spanish Lives......Page 283
Spenser, Edmund......Page 284
Staël-Holstein, Anne-Louise-Germaine, Baronne de......Page 285
Stanzas (‘How like a star you rose upon my life’)......Page 286
Stanzas (‘To love in solitude and mystery’)......Page 287
Stoker, Bram (Abraham)......Page 288
‘The Swiss Peasant’......Page 289
Switzerland......Page 290
‘A Tale of the Passions’......Page 292
‘Tempo è ben di Morire/Ed ho tardato più ch’i’ non vorrei’......Page 294
‘To a Lady Singing’......Page 295
‘Transformation’......Page 296
Trelawny, Edward John......Page 298
‘The Trial of Love’......Page 300
Trollope, Frances......Page 301
‘Valerius: the Reanimated Roman’......Page 302
Valperga: or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca......Page 305
Sources......Page 306
Themes......Page 309
Reception......Page 310
Velluti, Giovanni-Battista......Page 311
Villa Diodati......Page 312
Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro)......Page 313
Volney, Constantin François de Chasseboeuf, Comte de......Page 314
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)......Page 315
Walpole, Horace (Earl of Orford)......Page 316
Wells, H.G.......Page 317
Williams, Edward Ellerker......Page 318
Windsor......Page 319
Wollstonecraft, Mary......Page 320
Wordsworth, William......Page 322
Wright, Frances......Page 323
Bibliography......Page 324

Citation preview

PALGRAVE LITERARY DICTIONARIES

The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Martin Garrett

Palgrave Literary Dictionaries

Series Editors Brian G. Caraher School of English Queen’s University Belfast Belfast, Northern Ireland Elizabeth K. Switaj Liberal Arts College of the Marshall Islands Majuro, Republic of the Marshall Islands

Palgrave Literary Dictionaries are concise reference guides containing vital information for the study and appreciation of major writers and literary groups. Alphabetical entries provide accessible and informative summaries focusing on the historical and political contexts, key themes, locations and texts, as well as the critical reception of writers including Chaucer, Spenser and Milton. Each volume contains a chronology and a selective guide to further reading. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14684

Martin Garrett

The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Martin Garrett Independent Scholar Cambridge, UK

Palgrave Literary Dictionaries ISBN 978-1-137-56638-6    ISBN 978-1-137-56639-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56639-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Limited. The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom

To Helen

Also by Martin Garrett

‘A diamond, though set in horn’: Philip Massinger’s Attitude to Spectacle Massinger: the Critical Heritage (editor) Sidney: the Critical Heritage (editor) George Gordon, Lord Byron A Browning Chronology: Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning: Interviews and Recollections (editor) Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning Mary Shelley: a Chronology Mary Shelley The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Byron The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of [P.B.] Shelley A Romantics Chronology, 1780–1832 Greece: a Literary Companion Traveller’s Literary Companion: Italy Venice: a Cultural and Literary Companion Cambridge: a Cultural and Literary History Provence: a Cultural History The Loire: a Cultural History Oxford

vii

Contents

Series Editors’ Foreword  xi Preface and Acknowledgements  xiii Abbreviations  xv Mary Shelley Chronology  xix Entries A-Z  1 Bibliography317

ix

Series Editors’ Foreword

The purpose of the Palgrave Literary Dictionaries is to provide the reader with immediate access to reliable information on some of the major authors of literature written in the English language. These books are intended for a readership including students, graduate students, teachers, scholars and advanced general readers. Each volume will be dedicated either to an individual author or to a group of authors. It will offer a concise reference guide, consisting mainly of entries presented under headwords arranged in alphabetical order. The entries will vary in length from about 10 to about 3000 words, depending on the significance of the particular topic. The topics will include the literary works, individuals, fictional characters, genres, traditions, events, places, institutions, editors and scholars most relevant to a full and sophisticated understanding and appreciation of the author (or authors) in question. The more substantial entries will include suggestions for further reading, full particulars of which will be supplied in a selective bibliography. Access to information will be facilitated by extensive cross-referencing. We trust that volumes in this series will be judged by their effectiveness in providing quick, clear and convenient access to reliable and scholarly information. Belfast, Northern Ireland Majuro, Republic of the Marshall Islands

Brian G. Caraher Elizabeth K. Switaj

xi

Preface and Acknowledgements

The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Mary Shelley aims to gather as much information on her life and work as can be contained in a single volume. The task has been facilitated by the publication, mainly since the 1980s, of important complete editions of her journals, letters, novels, tales, biographies, and reviews. (For a list, see Abbreviations: 1. Works by Mary Shelley.) Prefaces to books about Mary Shelley usually mention the problems or opportunities presented by Frankenstein. Much is known about the novel’s composition, revision and reception; a great deal has been written about it; and few works have generated so many sequels, reinterpretations, parodies, films, plays, illustrations and more loosely related descendants. The Dictionary aims to cover some of this material while also putting it beside the author’s many other works in a variety of genres. Helped by recent attention to under-­ read books by women, by the collected editions just mentioned and by individual editions of several of the novels in the Penguin, Oxford World’s Classics and Broadview series, these works have been emerging, gradually, from their unjustified neglect. The Last Man seems now to have crossed the frontier from occasionally to frequently analysed text and there is much interest in Mathilda. Development is slower for most of the other works as yet; one advantage of a dictionary format is the prominence it gives to such relatively neglected material as Shelley’s tales and particularly to her wide-ranging Literary Lives of over sixty Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French writers. Attention to the late work also provides some counter-balance to the usual concentration on Shelley’s early work and life: the lives, the authoritative notes for two major PBS editions, Lodore, Falkner and Rambles were all written and published between 1831 and 1844. xiii

xiv 

Preface and Acknowledgements

The Dictionary sets out to document Mary Shelley’s reading as well as her writing. She read an extraordinary number and variety of books and referred to many in her early journals. For her later reading we must rely on more scattered mentions in journals, letters and published work; no doubt she read even more than the record suggests, and even where the early journals are concerned, it is not always clear whether she is reading or re-reading. There is a prehistory of unrecorded reading in her evidently precocious and studious childhood and youth before 1814; during these years she will also have met, or at least heard much about, the extraordinary list of poets, philosophers, novelists, politicians, and actors who visited or were visited by her father, William Godwin. One work included in LL is omitted here: Nora Crook intends to publish evidence that ‘Lacy de Vere’ is not by MWS (private communication, 2018). I am grateful to Professor Brian Caraher, Professor Nora Crook, Dr Ann Kennedy-Smith, Dr Robert Inglesfield, Dr Keith Linley, and the anonymous reader for Palgrave, for useful references, suggestions, and general encouragement. Cambridge, UK

Martin Garrett

Abbreviations

1. Works by Mary Shelley CT

Collected Tales and Stories of Mary Shelley: with Original Engravings, ed. Charles E. Robinson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) HSWT History of a Six Weeks’ Tour LL Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings, general ed. Nora Crook (London: Pickering, 2002) MWSJ The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814–1844, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) MWSL The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett, 3 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980–8) NSW The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, general ed. Nora Crook, with Pamela Clemit and Betty T. Bennett (London: Pickering, 1996)

2. Other BLJ

Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols (London: John Murray, 1973–82) BSM The Bodleian Shelley Notebooks, ed. Donald H. Reiman et al., 23 vols (New York: Garland, 1986–99) Baldick Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) CC Claire Clairmont CC The Clairmont Correspondence: Letters of Claire Clairmont, Charles Clairmont and Fanny Imlay Godwin, ed. Marion Kingston Stocking, 2 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) xv

xvi Abbreviations

CCJ

The Journals of Claire Clairmont, ed. Marion Kingston Stocking (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968) DNB Dictionary of National Biography Forry Steven Earl Forry, Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations of Frankenstein from Mary Shelley to the Present (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990) Godwin, CNM William Godwin, Collected Novels and Memoirs, general ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols (London: William Pickering, 1992) Godwin, PPW William Godwin, Political and Philosophical Writings, general ed. Mark Philp, 7 vols (London: William Pickering, 1993) Hansard The Parliamentary Debates … published under the superintendence of T.C. Hansard, New Series (1820–) Holmes Holmes, Richard, Shelley: the Pursuit (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974) MWS Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (until 30 December 1816, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin) MYR The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics: Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Donald H. Reiman et al., 9 vols (New York: Garland, 1985–97) PBS Percy Bysshe Shelley PBS 1824 Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Mary Shelley PBS 1839 The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Mary Shelley (4 vols) PBS 1840 The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Mary Shelley (1 vol) PBS 1840 Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments by Percy (Essays) Bysshe Shelley, ed. Mary Shelley (2 vols) PBSL The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964) PBS Prose The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. E.B. Murray, 1 vol completed (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) Palacio Jean de Palacio, Mary Shelley dans son oeuvre: contribution aux études shelleyennes (Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1969) PS The Poems of Shelley, 4 vols so far: vols 1–2, ed. Geoffrey Matthews and Kelvin Everest; vol. 3, ed. Jack Donovan, Cian Duffy, Kelvin Everest and Michael Rossington (Harlow: Longman, 1989–) SC Shelley and his Circle, ed. Kenneth Neill Cameron, Donald H. Reiman and Doucet Devin Fischer and others, 10 vols (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961–2002) Seymour Miranda Seymour, Mary Shelley (London: John Murray, 2000) Sunstein Emily K. Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (New York: Little, Brown, 1989)

 Abbreviations 

WGD WMW

Cambridge, UK 2019

xvii

The Diary of William Godwin, ed. Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy, and Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010). http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 7 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1989)

Martin Garrett

Mary Shelley Chronology

1797

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin born (30 August). Death of mother, Mary Wollstonecraft (10 September). 1812, 1813–1814 Lives in Scotland. 1814 Elopes with Percy Bysshe Shelley (July). They travel in Europe until September. 1815–1816 Lives at Bishopsgate, Windsor. 1816 Meets Lord Byron. Visit to Switzerland (summer). The Shelleys marry in London (30 December). 1817 History of a Six Weeks’ Tour published. 1817–1818 Lives at Marlow. 1818 Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus published. 1818–1823 MWS lives in Italy. 1818 Death of daughter, Clara Shelley, in Venice (24 September). 1819 Death of son, William Shelley, in Rome (7 June). Birth of son, Percy Florence, in Florence (12 November). 1819–1820 MWS writes Mathilda. 1820 Writes Midas and Proserpine. 1822 Death of PBS (8 July). 1823 Valperga: or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca. Returns to London. 1824 Death of Byron. MWS’s edition of Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley. 1826 The Last Man. 1828 Visits Paris. Catches and recovers from smallpox. Meets (April-May) French authors. 1829–1839 Publishes stories and poems in The Keepsake

xix

xx 

Mary Shelley Chronology

1830 The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, A Romance. 1831 Revised edition of Frankenstein. Proserpine published. 1835 Lodore. 1835–1837  Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain and Portugal. 1836 Death of father, William Godwin. 1837 Falkner. A Novel. 1838–1839 Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of France. 1839 MWS’s edition of The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. 1840, Travels in Germany, Italy and France. 1842–1843 1844 Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843. 1851 Dies at 24 Chester Square, London (1 February). 1922 Midas published. 1931 James Whale’s film Frankenstein. 1959 Mathilda published.

A

‘Absence’ Poem by ‘The Author of “Frankenstein”’ published in The Keepsake for MDCCCXXXI in November 1830. Consolation for the darkness of absence comes from the light of Memory and the ‘hope of dawn’, the bright ‘dear thought—he will return!’

‘Address to the Duchess of Angoulême’ Fragment of 1815 or 1816 in MWS’s hand. (The title is Alan M. Weinberg’s in BSM XXII Part Two). She, or less probably PBS, is the author. (The evidence for authorship is reviewed in PBS Prose 306–7 and LL 4.lxxvi–viii.) Queen Mary I—‘Bloody Mary’, the ‘detestable epithet’ of LL 4.349—speaks part of what might have gone on to become a dialogue like those in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead. She encourages Marie-Thérèse Charlotte, Duchess of Angoulême (1788–1851), daughter of Louis XVI and a leader of the reactionary ‘Ultras’, in her opposition to the more moderate policies of her uncle Louis XVIII. E.B. Murray argues that the piece is related to PBS’s ‘The Elysian Fields’: in the ‘Address’ ‘a monarchist from the hereafter preaches an absolute despotism which thereby provides a satirical counterpoint to the ingratiating liberalism’ which the speaker in ‘The Elysian Fields’ attempts to instil in Princess Charlotte, daughter of the Prince Regent (PBS Prose 307).

© The Author(s) 2019 M. Garrett, The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Palgrave Literary Dictionaries, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56639-3_1

1

2 A

Aeschylus (c.525–456 BCE) Athenian tragic dramatist. PBS dictated his translation of Prometheus Bound to MWS in July 1817 (MWSJ 177) and she alludes in passing to Agamemnon in 1825 (MWSL 1.466). Aeschylus ‘does not possess the pathos of ∗Sophocles, nor the variety and tenderness of Euripides; the interest on which he founds his Dramas is often elevated above human vicissitudes into the mighty passions and throes of gods and demigods’ (NSW 2.276).

Agrippa, Cornelius (1486–1535) Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, German scholar and alchemist. In Frankenstein the boy Victor engages enthusiastically with the outdated science or ‘wild fancies’ of his works (NSW 1.25–6). Agrippa features also as a character in ‘The Mortal Immortal’, where MWS’s interest ‘may have been rekindled’ by ∗Godwin’s research for Lives of the Necromancers (1834) (Roberts [1990], p. 87).

‘Alas I weep my life away’ Short poem of desolation, entered in MWSJ 522–3 in September 1831 but probably written in August: see LL 4.lxxx.

Alfieri, Vittorio (1749–1803) Dramatist. MWS began translating Mirra in September 1818 (PBSL 2.39; MWSJ 226) but is not known to have continued. Presumably with this undertaking in mind she read at least seven of his other plays in autumn 1818 (MWSJ 632). Also at this time, she read his autobiographical Vita di Vittorio Alfieri (1804), which she had first read in English translation in October 1814 (MWSJ 37, 229). The Vita was the ‘groundwork’ (LL 1.287) of ‘Alfieri’ in Italian Lives (LL 1.254–93), together with Charles Lloyd’s Memoirs of the Life and

  Alfred, King 

3

Writings of Vittorio Alfieri (1821) (LL 1.lv). She also consulted ∗Rossetti in April 1835 (MWSL 2.238–9, 240–2) and perhaps Gaetano Polidori (father of ∗Polidori and father-in-law of Rossetti), who had been Alfieri’s secretary in 1785–9. ‘Alfieri’ (‘one of the most penetrating and carefully composed’ and personal Italian Lives, notes LL 1.lv) explores the playwright’s restless, troubled and egotistical disposition. MWS praises the ‘eloquence and the passion of the dialogue’ and the deeply interesting ‘situations of struggle or peril’ in his best plays but finds his work essentially forced and unpoetical, based on ‘situation, not character’ and suffering from his refusal to read ∗Shakespeare and other writers of tragedy (LL 1.287, 280, 279).

Alfred, King (848/9–99) Ruler of the West Saxons from 871. In the eighteenth century, he had often been conscripted both as a patriotic Englishman and as an early representative of English liberalism. In 1823 MWS considered writing a novel about him (MWSL 1.361, 393).

America MWS’s American friends and acquaintances included ∗Payne, ∗Irving, ∗Wright and ∗Sumner. As a child she knew ∗Burr. She read novels by ∗Brown and ∗Cooper. She does not refer often to America but characters in Frankenstein lament ‘the hapless fate of its original inhabitants’ (NSW 1.89; see also NSW 1.38) and part of the first volume of Lodore is set in Illinois and, more briefly, New York. For the influence of MWS’s work on American authors, see Poe, Edgar Allan; Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Melville, Herman. Young (2008) provides an important and detailed account of the history of the Frankenstein metaphor in America, especially in polemics for and against black slavery and in literature influenced by them. If there were claims that those freeing slaves were Frankensteins creating uncontrollable monsters, on the other side, writers including Frederick Douglass presented slavery itself as the monstrosity (see Young [2008], p. 54).

4 A

Apuleius see ‘Cupid and Psyche’ Arabian Nights The eastern stories were available to MWS in a number of English translations from French. Tales of the East, edited by Henry Weber (1812), which she read in 1815 (MWSJ 92), included Arabian Nights’ Entertainments and New Arabian Nights. For further references see MWSJ 175; NSW 1.36, 2.168, 4.85 and 8.236. Nesvet (2010) finds similarities between the story-telling Scheherazade— an intelligent woman who resists the Sultan’s misogyny—and Safie in Frankenstein, Despina in ‘A Tale of the Passions’ and the eloquent Monina in Perkin Warbeck (pp.  173–84). And the Sultan, unlike Frankenstein, ‘learns finally to respect (and love) the spiritual freedom and integrity of beings he initially regards purely as physical creatures to be controlled and possessed’ (Zonana [1991], p. 177).

Argyropoulou, Princess Rallou Karatza (1799–1870) Greek translator and political activist who knew MWS in ∗Pisa. She was ∗Mavrokordatos’ cousin. MWS names the Greek commander-in-chief in The Last Man ‘Argyropolo’ (NSW 4.141).

Ariosto, Ludovico (1474–1533) Epic poet. MWS read his Orlando Furioso between May and July 1818 (MWSJ 211–20) and again in summer 1824 (MWSL 1.447). Brief references to Orlando and to Angelica in Frankenstein (NSW 24, 46) suggest earlier familiarity with at least parts of the work; PBS and CC were reading it in 1815 (MWSJ 75–6). She particularly admires the beginning of Canto 19— Angelica and the wounded Medoro (MWSL 1.73). Ariosto is a less great poet than ∗Spenser but ‘a much better story teller’; on the other hand he ‘runs on sometimes for stanza[s]—with nothing’ (MWSL 1.74, 76). The life of Ariosto in Italian Lives is by James Montgomery.

  ‘The Assassins: a Fragment of a Romance’ 

5

MWS visited Ariosto sites in Ferrara in November 1818. Further reading: Palacio.

‘The Assassins: a Fragment of a Romance’ Work published in PBS 1840 (Essays). PBS worked on it mainly in 1814; part of the manuscript is in MWS’s hand and she is possibly co-author of the fragment (PBS Prose 384–7).

Atwood, Margaret (born 1939) Novelist and poet. Her ‘Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein’ (1966) explores themes of creation, doubling, and pursuit. The doctor seeks to heal the gap left in his own side—alluding to Eve’s creation from Adam’s rib—by pursuing the creature he once rejected. But the creature, in his element in the icy wastes, has broken free. Banerjee (2014) analyses connections between Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Oryx and Crake (2003) and Frankenstein and The Last Man: gender dynamics, how both authors ‘use themes and ideas deriving from science to critique the ideologies and praxes of science’, MWS’s response to British imperialism and Atwood’s to ‘the imperialism of global capital’ (pp. 1–2).

‘Au Revoir’ Poem on the fragility of lovers’ promises, possibly by MWS (LL 4.lxxii), in The Keepsake for MDCCCXXXIII.

6 A

Austen, Jane (1775–1817) Novelist. MWS recommends Austen’s focus on domestic life as a model for Italian novelists (‘Modern Italian Romances’, LL 4.258). Her work exhibits humour, ‘vividness & correctness’ (MWSL 2.314).

Aziola or aziolo The horned or scops owl (Otus scops), more usually assiolo, whose cry is associated for MWS with her ‘happiest days’ in ∗Italy (MWSL 1.441). In ‘The Sisters of Albano’ she mentions ‘the cooing aziola’ (CT 51, originally ‘aziolo’); in the same Keepsake (for 1829) she printed PBS’s ‘The Aziola’, where ‘Mary’ identifies the call of this ‘little downy owl’, so that the connection between the two authors is discreetly asserted. (The editor of The Keepsake, Frederic Mansel Reynolds, reinforces the connection in his preface by thanking ‘the Author of Frankenstein’ for providing PBS’s ‘Essay [On Love] and Fragments’ [Reynolds (2006), p. iv].) For MWS’s many other references to the bird see Bennett (2003), pp. 221–2, and Shelley (2000), p. 405.

B

Bagni di Lucca Spa in the Duchy of Lucca. The Shelleys and CC lived at Casa Bertini between June and August 1818. MWS describes the pleasures of woodland walks to Maria ∗Gisborne (MWSL 1.72) but complains that they, and the place more generally, are ‘filled with English’ (74).

Baillie, Joanna (1762–1851) Playwright. MWS read plays by her, including Ethwald (1802) and De Montfort (1798) in December 1814 (MWSJ 49, 54, 55).

Barbauld, Anna Laetitia (1743–1825) References by ∗Godwin to Barbauld’s books for children in 1800 and 1802 (see Vargo [2005], p. 92) suggest MWS’s early familiarity with her work. As an adult she read Evenings at Home (1792–1796) in 1820 (MWSJ 314) and wanted a copy of Lessons for Children (1779, revised 1812) for her infant son Percy Florence ∗Shelley in 1823 (MWSL 1.306). For stoicism in Lodore (Fanny Derham) and in Barbauld’s essay ‘Against Inconsistency in Our Expectations’ (1773) see Vargo (2005). © The Author(s) 2019 M. Garrett, The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Palgrave Literary Dictionaries, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56639-3_2

7

8 B

Barruel, Abbé Augustin (1741–1820) Jesuit controversialist. In 1814 MWS and PBS read his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme (1797), translated in 1797–1798 as Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (MWSJ 18, 19, 34). Elements of relevance to Frankenstein include Barruel’s ‘History of the Illuminati’ (MWSJ 34) of ∗Ingolstadt as an anti-religious society responsible for the ∗French Revolution, and ‘a monster called Jacobin’. Further reading: Sterrenburg (1979).

Bath Spa town where MWS lived between September 1816 and January 1817.

Beauclerk, Aubrey (1801–1854) Army major and politician, known to MWS by April 1831. As MP for Surrey Eastern (1832–1837), he spoke frequently in Parliament in opposition to slavery, the new Poor Law, military flogging and punishment for blasphemy. No doubt his involvement in these liberal causes was part of his appeal to MWS; another liberal credential was that he had been to ∗Greece (Hansard 24.629). There is considerable evidence that MWS fell in love with and wanted to marry Beauclerk. (See further BSM XXII–2, 35–6; Sunstein 316, 321–2; Seymour 425–6; MWSJ 600–1.) CC claimed in the 1870s that she accepted his proposal but withdrew because of his family’s doubts about her finances (CC 357 n.6). Either these events or the announcement of his marriage to Ida Goring must have been the ‘frightful calamity’ of MWSJ 530; on the day of the wedding in 1832, she writes ‘Farewell’ (MWSJ 537). Ida Goring Beauclerk died in 1838 but MWS’s partially renewed hope of marriage (MWSJ 563–4) was dashed when instead Aubrey Beauclerk married Rosa Matilda ∗Robinson in 1841.

  Beckford, William 

9

Beckford, William (1760–1844) Gothic novelist and art collector. He wrote pencil notes in his copy of HSWT, sympathizing with youthful enthusiasm for nature but censuring MWS’s disgust at German travellers; he found PBS’s contributions to the work ‘mad’ and nonsensical (SC vii.44). On the flyleaf of his 1818 Frankenstein he branded it as ‘perhaps, the foulest Toadstool that has yet sprung up from the reeking dunghill of the present times’ (Gotlieb [1960], p. 61). MWS seems to have responded more positively to Beckford’s work. In Rambles (NSW 8.248–9) she quotes approvingly his celebration of the Tyrol in Italy, with Sketches of Spain and Portugal (1834). She had read Vathek (1786) in 1815 (MWSJ 90); Baldick 36 suggests that Vathek’s ‘insolent curiosity of penetrating the secrets of heaven’ (Beckford [2013], p. 5) is a possible influence on Frankenstein (see NSW 1.32).

Bentley’s Standard Novels see Colburn and Bentley Berni, Francesco see Boiardo, Matteo Bible MWS records reading the Bible, or parts of it, in 1815, March and August 1819 and January and March 1820 (see MWSJ 636–7). She will already, however, have been familiar with the text since childhood. ∗Godwin, as William Scolfield, wrote Bible Stories (1802) for children, ‘determined’, as St Clair (1989) says, that his children ‘should understand the historical origins of the culture within which they lived’ (p. 282). She refers most often to Genesis (for example NSW 2.60, 4.319), Ecclesiastes (MWSJ 306, NSW 4.252, 253, 323, 5.132) and the Gospels (NSW 1.63 and n.a, 2. 251, 4.117, MWSL 1.321, MWSJ 302, 304–5).

Biography MWS’s principal works as a biographer are Literary Lives and the notes for her PBS editions. (See also ‘Madame d’Houtetot’; ‘Life of William Godwin’; ‘Life of Shelley’.) She also proposed lives including those of celebrated women (MWSL 2.115). Biography, says North (2009) ‘was the

10 B

means to bring high culture to a popular audience’ and ‘a commercially viable form’ (p. 108). Her ‘biographical practice’ was ‘shaped by a sophisticated awareness of the gendering of private and public life and an ideological commitment to the domestic affections as the foundation of genius’ (p. 125). She signals her commitment to truth rather than undue speculation in ‘Camoens’ (LL 2.265). For biographies of MWS see Gilfillan, George; Marshall, Florence Ashton; Rossetti, Lucy Madox; Spark, Dame Muriel.

Boccaccio, Giovanni (1313–1375) Author of works including The Decameron, which MWS read in May 1819 (MWSJ 262–4; see also 332–4). ‘The tenderness, the passion, the enthusiasm, the pathos, and … the heartfelt nature of his best tales, raise him to the highest rank of writers’; defects are to be blamed on ‘the licentious manners of the people about him’ in the court of ∗Naples (LL 1.61–2). ‘Boccaccio’ in Italian Lives also praises ‘his ardent and disinterested love of letters’, especially his promotion of Greek language and literature (LL 1.65) and of ∗Dante (66). But his use of Latin in his late works, under ∗Petrarch’s influence, produced ‘instead of works of imagination and genius, heavy treatises and inaccurate histories’; ‘he rattled the dry bones of the skeleton of a dead language, instead of making use of the young and vigorous tongue [Tuscan Italian] to which he had given birth’ (72). In Valperga Borsiere, a character from The Decameron, is ‘imagined as staging versions of two stories’ which will become Boccaccio’s Teseida and Il Filostrato (NSW 3.117n.). Further reading: Palacio.

Boiardo, Matteo (1441–1494) Author of Orlando Innamorato. ‘Bojardo’ in Italian Lives—the spelling is a traditional alternative—summarizes the poem and salutes its variety and inventiveness. In ‘Berni’ MWS contrasts its ‘earnest language’ with the ‘graceful wit’ of the revision by Francesco Berni (1497/8–1535) (LL 1.111).

  Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas 

11

Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas (1636–1711) Poet and critic. MWS likes especially the ‘fancy and sportive wit’ of his mock-heroic Le Lutrin; it is less graceful but more witty than ∗Pope’s The Rape of the Lock and ‘abounds with those happy lines, many of which have passed into proverbs, while others concentrate, as it were, a whole comedy into a few lines’ (LL 3.147–8). But she finds his criticism of fellow authors too personal. ‘It reminds us too strongly of the anonymous critics of the present day not to be held in detestation’ (LL 3. 170). LL 3.xvii finds the biography ‘central to [MWS’s] critique of religious bigotry’ in its applause for Boileau’s brave use of laughter to fight ‘abuses of clerical power’. It is ‘closely linked to her understanding of ∗Voltaire’s practice of satire and his view of his seventeenth-century predecessors’.

Booth, Isabella Baxter (c.1795–1863) Early close friend of MWS.  They met when MWS stayed with William Baxter’s family at Broughty Ferry, near Dundee, in 1812 and 1813–1814. Isabel Baxter’s sister Christina or Christy (1792/3?–1886) accompanied her back to ∗London in 1812–1813. From 1814 Isabel Baxter was married to David Booth (1766–1846), who forbade the friendship, perhaps not only because he disapproved of MWS’s elopement with PBS (see MWSL 1.5 n.2 and SC 2.558–9) but also because ‘his own “unlawful marriage” made him particularly sensitive on such questions’ (SC 2.559)—he and William Baxter were excommunicated by the Glassite church because his first wife had been Isabel Baxter’s sister Margaret. Seymour 85 suggests that for MWS ‘such a bold flouting of convention became a definition of love’. The fluctuating relationship between the two women was an initial inspiration for PBS’s Rosalind and Helen (written 1816–1818, published 1819). The friends met again in September 1823 (MWSL 1.380 and 382 n.15). In a letter of June 1828 Booth tried to re-establish contact, lamenting the fate which had cut their friendship short (MWSJ 510–11 n.1). (Bennett [1997b], p. 64 n.56, points out that the Isabel MWS was disappointed with in 1830 [MWSJ 516] was clearly Isabel ∗Robinson Douglas.) They met at least once more, in 1847 (MWSL 3.325). For MWS’s efforts to obtain government and Royal Literary Fund financial aid for the Booths see MWSL 3.196–8, 203–4, 302–4, and Bennett (1997b), pp. 70–1. MWS bequeathed her £50 a year.

12 B

Boscán de Almogáver, Juan (1487/92–1542) Poet (in Catalan Joan Boscà Almugaver). In 1827 MWS copied a sonnet by him into her journal (MWSJ 500). In Spanish Lives she looks at his adaptation of Italian poetic models and quotes and translates substantial examples of his verse. Like most Spanish poets, ‘he cannot compress’: idea follows idea ‘in artless unconstrained flow’ (LL 2.42). Following her sources but true also to ‘one of the ideological purposes of her Lives’, MWS believes that Boscán’s work ‘incorporates descriptions of his domestic bliss’ (LL 2.xxix; see also Palacio 528–9).

Boswell, James see Johnson, Samuel Bowring, (Sir) John (1792–1872) Friend and correspondent of MWS from the mid-1820s. He was a translator, Member of Parliament and diplomat, Secretary of the London Greek Committee from 1823 and one of the editors of the Westminster Review from 1824. MWS’s letters to Bowring, in MWSL and Bennett (1997b), concern her work for the Westminster, search for Spanish sources for Perkin Warbeck, and borrowing and copying of ∗Byron’s letters to Bowring for use by ∗Moore. She again sought his help and advice during the composition of Spanish Lives (see MWSL 2.254–5, 289, 290), where she drew on his translations in Ancient Poetry and Romances of Spain (1824) and his ‘Poetical Literature of Spain’ in The Retrospective Review III-IV (1821) and VI (1822).

The Bravo; a Venetian Story Novel (1831) by ∗Cooper, reviewed by MWS in The Westminster Review (January 1832). He avoids the problem of his lack of detailed knowledge of Venetian society and history by basing his narrative ‘upon passions, not manners’ (NSW 2.221). Round an ‘apparently common-place nucleus’ of escape and pursuit he brings in ‘personages … novel, individual, and true’ (222). There are, however, some ‘involved and tedious dialogues’, minor defects in plotting, and too frequent ‘melo-dramatic colouring’ (228).

  Bremer, Fredrika 

13

MWS revised the review to make it a little less laudatory in the light of criticism by the owner of the Westminster, Colonel Thomas Perronet Thompson (NWS 2.115; MWSL 2.152 and n.1.; Crook [2009], pp. 39–40, n.4).

Bremer, Fredrika (1801–1865) Swedish novelist and campaigner for women’s rights. MWS read The President’s Daughters; including Nina in Mary Howitt’s translation of 1843, probably in autumn that year (MWSL 3.94).

‘The Bride of Modern Italy’ Story published, anonymously, in the London Magazine for April 1824. Clorinda is confined to a convent in Rome while waiting for her parents to marry her to a suitable man. She appears to love Giacomo, brother of her friend Teresa, but after his marriage proposal is rejected by her family she soon switches her affections to the English artist Marcott Alleyn. Eventually, however, she has to marry her parents’ choice, a man with an estate near Spoleto. Both Giacomo and Alleyn, far from playing the roles of imprudent young men, avoid acting on Clorinda’s suggestions that they should run away with her. In this tale with ‘the brio of a ∗Peacock novella’ (Seymour 338), Clorinda’s situation is evidently modelled on that of ∗Viviani, with Alleyn loosely corresponding to PBS. MWS presents a ‘gently critical portrait of her husband’, suggests Markley (1997), partly balancing his idealization as Adrian in The Last Man (p.  104). The fickleness of lovers, male and female, is subject to satire, with Clorinda named unsuitably after ∗Tasso’s heroic female warrior, beloved of Tancredi, in La Gerusalemme liberata. (Alleyn is painting another contrasting figure, Eloisa, the archetypal loyal lover in a convent.) A ‘giddy flirt’, as Seymour 338 puts it, she changes the saint she venerates when she changes lover, as Viviani told CC that she did (CCJ 243). Markley (1997) connects her surname, ‘Saviani’, with savio, ‘wise’ as an indication that she is not as innocent as she seems (p. 104). Conger (1997) sees Clorinda in a more serious, partly Wollstonecraftian light, as a victim of deficient education and ‘socioeconomic conditioning’, showing that ‘women often serve as mere ­pretexts for commodity exchange; that they are … little more than the refuse of their societies’ (pp. 86–7).

14 B

Brighton Seaside town in Sussex. In MWS’s ‘A Visit to Brighton’, a satirical travel essay in The London Magazine for December 1826, she finds most aspects of the place unsatisfactory—there is too little vegetation, too much chalk and sea, very few people in Kemp Town, the libraries are full of noise, the sea-bathing is too public. There are some good buildings. ‘I do not dislike the Pavillion’ (the Royal Pavilion, rebuilt by John Nash between 1815 and 1823) but ‘Its chief defect is, that it is situated in Brighton’ rather than in the East which its architecture evokes (NSW 2.170–1). MWS visited the town in August 1826. Some years earlier it had been considered fashionable because of the patronage of George IV as Prince of Wales. She lived here between October 1836 and February 1837, returning in June 1837, June 1840, October 1845, June to August 1847, and October to November 1848. Illness—the search for a warmer climate—prompted several of these later visits.

Brontë, Charlotte (1816–1855) Novelist. That she read or knew of Frankenstein is shown by her reference, in her Brussels ‘Devoir de Style’ of 1843 on ‘La Chute des Feuilles’, to ‘that German student who believed he was learning to create, in learning to dissect’ (Brontë [1996], p. 240). Young (1991) explores many connections between Frankenstein and Jane Eyre (1847). Bertha Mason is Jane’s doppelgänger as the monster is his creator’s (p.  327). During the episode of Jane’s flight from Thornfield her ‘association … with the wretched and unhappy monster produces a symbolic commentary on her feelings of isolation and alienation, and on her desire to achieve a satisfying integration in a society that seems to have no place for her’ (p.  327). More detailed parallels include her looking, excluded, through the window of Moor House and the creature looking into the De Laceys’ cottage (p. 333). Both novels are often considered seminal to the development of feminist literary studies.

Brontë, Emily (1818–1848) Novelist and poet. Gilbert and Gubar (1979) compare Wuthering Heights (1847) and Frankenstein, highlighting their ‘concentric circles of narration’—

  ‘The Brother and Sister: an Italian Story’ 

15

‘an evidentiary narrative technique’ which ‘emphasises the ironic disjunction[s] between different perspectives on the same events’ (p. 249). Both novels are ‘consciously literary works’, much concerned with books and reading, and in both a sense of ‘motherlessness’ encourages ‘a fascination with the question of origins’ (pp. 250, 251). Lanone (2016) explores further points of contact: the creature destroys Frankenstein’s family when he is denied a mate and Heathcliff strives to destroy the family of his enemies when he loses Cathy, ‘his surrogate sister/beloved’ (p. 60); ‘Deemed not quite human, Heathcliff is turned into a monster by oppression’, but in the end ‘destroys himself in an inner struggle which represents, in introjected form’, the ‘self-destructive relationship’ between the creature and Frankenstein (pp. 60–1). Pykett (1989) finds links between Valperga and Wuthering Heights including Castruccio as ‘a prototype Heathcliff’ (p. 31).

‘The Brother and Sister: an Italian Story’ Tale by ‘the Author of Frankenstein’ published in November 1832  in The Keepsake for MDCCCXXXIII. The fair-copy manuscript was completed by early July 1832 (CT 386). Revisions, made between then and November, include the changing of the title and the name of the main character from ‘Angeline’. She became Flora presumably to accord with the Keepsake illustration ‘Flora’ (engraved by Francis Engleheart from a drawing by Louisa Sharpe). For the deleted manuscript passages see CT 386–8. ‘The Brother and Sister’ appeared also in Match-Making and Other Tales (Philadelphia, 1832) and, as ‘Le Frère et la Soeur’ by ‘Mistress Shelley’ in Le Salmigondis: Contes de toutes les couleurs (3 vols, Paris, 1832). Le Salmigondis for 1832 was an ambitious collection also including tales by Balzac, George Sand, Alexandre Dumas, Fanny ∗Trollope and Caroline ∗Norton. In the time of family vendettas in medieval Italian cities, Ugo Mancini has been banished from Siena by his enemies the Tolomei. His son Lorenzo returns to the city with his young sister, Flora, on Ugo’s death. Lorenzo has been brought up to hate and plan the destruction of the Tolomei. Following a skirmish with Count Fabian de’ Tolomei and his followers, Lorenzo is imprisoned and then banished for five years. Wanting to leave his beloved sister in safety, he decides boldly to ask Fabian to protect her during his absence. Flora lives in the household of Fabian’s initially hostile mother, impressing everyone with her modesty and care for others, while remaining highly devoted to her brother. When she selflessly nurses Fabian after a fall from his horse, he, already attracted to her, falls in love. In loyalty to her

16 B

brother, she adopts a cold demeanour towards him—or tries to. Their relationship develops promisingly but cannot proceed further because of the feud and because Flora has promised Lorenzo not to ‘bind herself by any … vow’ until he returns (CT 173). (As Robinson notes, the story ‘offers a sophisticated study of a young girl’s idealization of her brother’ [CT 385–6].) The difficulties are resolved when Flora and Fabian separately set off, at the end of the five years, in search of Lorenzo. Fabian reaches an inn in the Apennines where he finds Lorenzo gravely ill and, without revealing his identity, nurses him back to health by the time Flora, several days later, happens upon the same inn. She confirms to her brother what he has heard about Fabian’s noble and generous care for her; all three will return to Siena, ‘exiles and foes no longer’, to ‘enjoy the happiness which Providence, after so many trials, has bounteously reserved for us’ (189). The Tolomei were powerful in Siena especially in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. MWS very probably read about the feud between them and the Salimbeni in ∗Villani’s chronicle (Book Nine, chapters 96 and 147 in volume 4 of the 1823 edition). MWS invents the Mancini rivalry; the name may be inspired by the Sienese scholar, physician and art historian Giulio Mancini (1559–1630). It is also conceivable that she knew of the conservative churchman Giuseppe Mancini (1777–1855), Archbishop of Siena since 1824. For Markley (2000) although at the end of the story the patriarchy remains in place, ‘in her willingness to step out of her carefully delineated place in society, Flora single-handedly restores order to two families that had been torn apart by competing forces of masculine domination’ (p. 122). Elizabeth Raby in Falkner will similarly achieve reconciliation between male characters and a final harmonious group of three. Resolution of the feud is helped by Fabian’s traditionally feminine virtues (like Neville’s in Falkner); Flora nurses him and he nurses Lorenzo. As in Romeo and Juliet—mentioned at the opening of the tale (CT 166)—the family divide is crossed but here to benign effect. It is as if the Capulets and Montagues had stopped their feud in time to avert tragedy: the heroine’s brother, unlike Juliet’s cousin Tybalt, lives to embrace her lover, and the older generation, represented by Fabian’s mother the Countess, comes to support the cause of true love rather than family only.

Brown, Charles Brockden (1771–1810) American novelist. MWS knew his novels including Edgar Huntley; or, the Sleep-walker (1799), Wieland; or, the Transformation (1798), Ormond; or, the

  Bulgakov, Mikhail 

17

Secret Witness (1799) and Arthur Mervyn (1799–1800) (MWSJ 45, 89, 91, 100). MWSL 1.498 n.3 notes that he was a friend of ∗Payne, who in 1825 obtained for her a copy of William Dunlap’s life of Brown (1815). For MWS’s further development of the themes and ‘narrative complexity’ of Wieland see Clemit (1993), p. 144. Arthur Mervyn supplies a partial precedent for the use of plague in The Last Man: Brown’s yellow-fever epidemic ‘throws into sharp relief the moral degeneration of post-revolutionary society’ (Clemit [1993], p. 194).

Bulgakov, Mikhail (1891–1940) Russian playwright and novelist. In his satirical novella Heart of a Dog (1925), a scientist implants human testicles and pituitary gland into a dog. Similarities with Frankenstein include such ‘inset-narrative techniques’ as a scientific journal (Morton [2002], p. 59).

Bulwer, Edward Lytton (1803–1873) Novelist and politician (called, from 1843, Edward Bulwer Lytton). MWS knew him by March 1830 (see MWSL 2.106 n.1). She was enthusiastic about his work: ‘the sublime’ Paul Clifford (1830) suggests that this ‘magnificent writer’ will surely become ‘the first Author of the age’ (MWSJ 517); Godolphin (1833) is ‘like all His things in a high tone of feeling & truth & beauty’ (MWSL 2.199); The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), which she read in 1834 and again before revisiting the site in 1843, ‘has peopled its silence’ (MWSL 2.207, 210, NSW 8.376). She sent him a detailed analysis of the virtues of his play The Lady of Lyons (1838), where ‘The interest is well sustained – the dialogue natural’, ‘the incidents flow from the dialogue’ and ‘one from another’, he has ‘left the beaten road of old romance … & idealized the present’ and found the secret of pleasing the public (MWSL 2.295). (The praise seems more muted in LL 2.53, where it is ‘charming’ but characteristic of a time ‘when poetry is at a low ebb, and an audience desires rather to be amused, than deeply moved’.) She refers also to Pelham (1828) (NSW 2.202), Devereux (1829) (MWSL 2.80–1) and Night and Morning (1841) (MWSL 3. 344). She wrote a review of Eugene Aram, probably in January 1832, which appears to have been rejected by

18 B

The Westminster Review (see MWSL 2.152 n.1, 155) and has not, as far as is known, survived. In person, MWS came to find Bulwer very disappointing, while conceding that she may not know him intimately enough to judge him (MWSL 2.261). In letters of 1834 and 1835, she censures his vanity, ‘disappointed ambition’, ‘vulgarity of fashion’, ignorant misjudgement of Italians, ill temper and ridiculous ‘flirtations’ (MWSL 2.210, 261). (Probably her dislike was influenced by Bulwer’s unfaithfulness to his wife, Rosina Doyle Bulwer; they separated after nine years of largely disastrous marriage in 1836.) She ‘admired his novels so much, I wanted him to be a great man but he is envious as well as vain’ (MWSL 2.261). In 1846, she was further angered by Bulwer’s disparaging remarks about PBS’s poetry in The Poems and Ballads of Schiller (1844) (MWSL 3.275). See also: Lodore; Silver-Fork Novel.

Burchiello, Il (Domenico di Giovanni) (1404–1449) Poet. The very brief ‘Burchiello’ in Italian Lives finds his work ‘a strange and capricious mixture of sayings, proverbs, and jokes’, now mostly unintelligible. (LL 1.180)

Burke, Edmund (1729–1797) Politician and author, ‘an eloquent and philosophic writer’ (NSW 4.4.180). His work, especially Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), informs political debate in The Last Man (see NSW 4.126, 175–6 and 176 n.a, 180, 319); in ‘Life of William Godwin’, MWS characterizes Reflections as ‘Burke’s eloquent & impressive appeal to the prejudices & softer feelings of Men’ and ∗Paine’s Rights of Man as the most convincing answer to it (LL 4.49). She was also familiar with Letter to a Noble Lord (1796) and A Vindication of Natural Society (1756) (NSW 4.278n, 279n; MWSJ 91 and n.4). For Frankenstein and the sublime (influentially defined by Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757) see Mellor (1990b).

  Burney, Frances (Madame D’Arblay) 

19

Burney, Frances (Madame D’Arblay) (1752–1840) Fanny Burney, novelist. MWS must have been familiar with such well known works by Burney as Evelina (1778) but refers to her rarely. She probably read her The Wanderer (1814) in 1816 (MWSJ 149 and n.6). Longing, in a letter probably of 1823, to read a novel, she seeks ‘Miss Burney  – Mrs ∗Radcliffe – or the last of ∗Scott’ (MWSL 1.308). There is a possible allusion to Cecilia (1782) in Lodore (NSW 6.279 n.) and MWS finds ‘highly interesting & valuable’ Burney’s account of Samuel ∗Johnson and his circle in Memoirs of Dr Burney (1832) (MWSL 2.223).

Burns, Robert (1759–1796) Poet. MWS alludes to ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ (1791) (NSW 4.332, 6.99, 303); ‘John Anderson My Jo’ (1789) (NSW 5.211) and ‘Lament for James, Earl of Glencairn’ (1793) (MWSL 1.543, 3.407). His patriotism and tenderness sprang ‘from a noble and gentle heart’ (NSW 2.333).

Burr, Aaron (1756–1836) Vice-President of the United States 1801–1805. He came to Europe in 1808 following his arrest and acquittal for treason in 1807. He saw much of ∗Godwin in 1808–1809 and 1811–1812. On 15 February 1812 he records visiting the Godwins; he heard a ‘lecture’ on government, delivered by William ∗Godwin, Junior, and written by ‘one of his sisters (Mary, I think)’. Later ‘the girls sang and danced an hour’ (Burr [1838], volume 2, p. 307).

Byron, George Gordon, Lord (1788–1824) Poet. MWS was introduced to him by CC in April 1816, knew him that summer at ∗Villa Diodati, and saw him again in ∗Venice in autumn 1818, ∗Pisa in 1821–1822 and ∗Genoa in 1822–1823. In 1824 she sent a tribute

20 B

(unpublished and now lost) to The London Magazine (MWSL 1.422, 423 n.2) and later used her considerable knowledge of Byron’s life, work and friendships to help ∗Moore with Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (1830). (She was one of the few people who had read, probably in 1818, his subsequently destroyed Memoirs.) MWS was familiar with most of his work (see MWSJ 639–40). Some of it had strong personal associations for her, as when in 1817 ‘I am melancholy with reading the 3rd Canto of Childe Harold’ because she remembers PBS reading it to her ‘one evening after returning from Diodati’ and this prompts thoughts of time passing and of their absent friend; Byron would come smilingly to meet them and ‘How very vividly does each verse of his poem recall some scene of this kind to my memory’ (MWSJ 171–2). She followed the changing style and emphasis of his work, coming to ‘delight in your new style more than in your former glorious one’ (MWSL 1. 289) and finding Cain ‘in the highest style of imaginative Poetry’, appearing ‘almost a revelation from its power and beauty’ (MWSL 1. 209, 214). She was an astute critic of his work: for her concise and decided analysis of its successive stages for ∗Murray, see MWSL 2.163–4. MWS’s engagement with Byron’s poems was particularly close because she fair-copied many of them between 1816 and 1823. She worked on pieces including Mazeppa, ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’, Childe Harold Canto III, Don Juan Cantos VI-XVI (see Cochran [1996]) and The Deformed Transformed—‘a great favourite of mine’ (MWSL 1.285). (Among the copies that survive are those of ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’, Childe Harold III, Mazeppa and Don Juan VI-VIII.) Blumberg (1993) gives as an example of her detailed sense of the ‘dynamic’ of Mazeppa her substitution of ‘see’ for ‘hear’ in ‘joyed to hear how well he [his courser] fed’ (line 63), ‘underscoring Mazeppa’s personal care of his horse’ and adding to his sympathetic presentation (p. 207). In copying Don Juan ‘I omitted all that hurt my taste’ (MWSL 2.120): she left blank a number of sexual references (for example in VIII.76 and 130) and changed ‘breast’ several times to ‘heart’ (VI.15, 67 and 87). Many more of her changes, in this poem and others, consisted of choosing between alternative readings proposed by Byron, alterations to capitalization and omission of dashes. Often her changes were rejected but the copying and correcting undoubtedly left her with an unusually intimate understanding of the work. MWS’s personal relationship with ‘the dear capricious fascinating’ (MWSJ 478) Byron was complex and varying. It was complicated by his liaison with CC and its aftermath (see Clairmont, Claire and, for example, MWSL 1.49) and, in Pisa, by tensions between Byron and PBS. After PBS’s death Byron’s voice had a peculiar power of exciting melancholy in her because she had

  Byron, George Gordon, Lord 

21

heard it so often in conversation with PBS in ∗Switzerland in 1816 (MWSJ 439–40). But her attitude to him in Genoa ‘vacillated’ (MWSJ 457–8 n.1); there was strain over his failure to give CC the money he promised in early 1823, anxiety not to accept a loan and become his dependent, and anger when he suggested that she agree to Sir Timothy ∗Shelley’s proposal to support her child on condition that she give him up (see MWSL 1.315–16, 318, 320). Byron offered to pay for her journey back to England; she refused the money after Leigh ∗Hunt showed her letters in which Byron referred disparagingly to her and PBS. (See further Seymour 324–5; MWSL 1.344). In July 1823 she told Jane ∗Williams that meanness was ‘the primum mobile’ of his actions and expressed scepticism about his motives in going to ∗Greece. (Cochran [1996] suggests that ‘her cynicism … sounds defensive’ [p. 240].) Yet when she heard the news of his death there in 1824 she reflected on the loss of all ‘the beings I best loved’, on evenings with him at Diodati ‘in the bright days of youth, when neither care nor fear had visited me’, his consolation in her misery, and his beauty and power—‘his faults being for the most part weaknesses induced one readily to pardon them’ (MWSJ 478). In Moore’s completed Byron Letters and Journals she found—partly because of her own input—‘our Lord Byron – the fascinating – faulty – childish – philosophical being—daring the world – docile to a private circle – impetuous and indolent – gloomy and yet more gay than any other – I live with him again … – getting reconciled (as I used in his lifetime) to those waywardnesses which annoyed me when he was away, through the delightful & buoyant tone of his conversation and manners -’ (MWSL 2.101–2). It has often been suggested that there was a strong sexual element in MWS’s response to Byron. (Contemporary gossip made him her lover—see for instance Robinson [1938], p. 412—and Lovell [1953] claims that Byron features in her novels as ‘symbol of one of her most deeply felt needs, that of a Father-lover, the desired pillar of masculine power and authority’ [p. 49].) But their engagement with each other seems to have been above all intellectual. He was keen to meet the daughter of her parents and acknowledged Frankenstein in May 1819 as ‘a wonderful work for a Girl of nineteen – not nineteen indeed  – at that time’ (BLJ 6.126). (For Byron’s copy of the first volume of the novel, signed by the author, see Jones [2013].) The ‘darker aspects’ of Frankenstein recall ‘Byron and his anti-heroes, Childe Harold and Manfred’ (Franklin [2013], p. 46). Like them (and the ‘Byronic heroes’ of his Oriental Tales) he is ‘often overcome by gloom’ and believes ‘his destiny is determined’, and his ‘appearance and “mobility” are distinctly Byronic’ (Franklin [2013], pp. 46–7; NSW 1.25, 17, 19). CC accuses MWS of depicting Byron repeatedly—‘that vile spirit’ haunts ‘all your other novels [but

22 B

Frankenstein], now as Castruccio, now as Raymond, now as Lodore’ (CC 2.341). Certainly there are Byronic aspects to these characters—not unusually for their period; the resemblance is most apparent in Lord Raymond in The Last Man. (A minor example of his work informing her writing is the echo of ‘Darkness’, lines 3–4 and 71, when she describes the weather in October 1827: ‘all seems so dark – so rayless – so very comfortless’ [MWSL 2.15]). Her work also influenced him. For instance Cantor (1993) suggests that Frankenstein may have ‘helped to shape Byron’s conception [in The Deformed Transformed] of a creature so deformed that he can find no place in society and above all no one to love him’ (p.  95). Beyond such direct links, they belonged to a common context. In 1816 they participated in the process of reading, discussion and writing which initiated Frankenstein and works by Byron and ∗Polidori. They explored common themes: MWS produced her novels ‘not passively under Byron’s spell but as a member of a coterie in which she, Percy, and Byron, competed in producing … versions of the ∗Prometheus legend’ (Franklin [2013], p. 45). Robinson (2009) shows how ‘Prometheus … provided both Byron and Mary Shelley an opportunity to universalize their themes about the mis-creative artist’. Manfred’s ‘Faustian or Frankensteinian aspirations eventually lead to the death of his love, Astarte; and Victor Frankenstein, whose pursuit of knowledge led to the death of his wife Elizabeth, dabbled in the same unholy arts as Manfred’ (p.  16). Both Manfred and Frankenstein ‘used the doppelgänger to externalize an internal conflict between head and heart, each protagonist committing suicide by way of destroying a better version of himself ’ (p. 23; Robinson also considers the role of dream in the genesis of Frankenstein and in Byron’s ‘Darkness’ and ‘The Dream’). Discussion of Promethean figures continues in MWS’s subsequent novels.

‘Byron and Shelley on the Character of Hamlet’ Article in The New Monthly Magazine (November 1830) sometimes attributed to MWS but more likely to be by ∗Medwin: see LL 4.lxxi.

C

Calderón de la Barca, Pedro (1600–1681) For MWS, Calderón is ‘the greatest poet of Spain’ (‘Calderon’, Spanish Lives, LL 2.245), far transcending ∗Lope de Vega ‘in the higher gifts of poetry, creative imagination, sublimity, and force’ (LL 2.247). She was reading him by December 1820 (MWSJ 341), edited PBS’s translation of scenes from El magico prodigioso for PBS 1824 (see LL 2.251 and xxxiii), and quotes La vida es sueño several times in The Last Man; it is ‘full of wild strange interest, original and sublime’ (LL 2.252). One of the main sources of the life is Juan de Vera Tassis y Villarroel’s Fama, vida y escritos de don Pedro Calderón de la Barca (LL 2.xxxiii), first published in 1683.

Camoens (Camões), Luis Vaz de (1524–1580) Portuguese poet. Sources for ‘Camoens’ (see LL 2.xxxiv) include John Adamson’s Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Luis de Camoens (1820) and ∗Southey’s review of it in The Quarterly Review for April 1822. MWS discusses the poet’s work—including the ‘magnanimous sentiments, patriotism, and piety’ of his Lusiads (LL 2.291)—but focuses particularly on his poverty and successive misfortunes. ‘He was a martyr to that political system which

© The Author(s) 2019 M. Garrett, The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Palgrave Literary Dictionaries, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56639-3_3

23

24 C

created a body of men, (the younger sons of the nobility), who, if they inherited no property, could acquire a livelihood only by court favour’ (LL 2.289). See also: Portugal.

Canning, George (1770–1827) Foreign Secretary 1822–1827 and Prime Minister April-August 1827. On 16 March 1824, arguing that emancipation of slaves in the Caribbean must be gradual, he alluded, in the House of Commons, to Frankenstein: ‘we must remember that we are dealing with a being possessing the form and strength of a man, but the intellect only of a child. To turn him loose in the manhood of his physical strength, in the maturity of his physical passions, but in the infancy of his uninstructed reason, would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance; the hero of which constructs a human form … but being unable to impart to the work of his hands a perception of right and wrong, finds too late that he has only created a more than mortal power of doing mischief ’ (Hansard 10.1103). MWS found this reference ‘a compliment … sufficiently pleasing’ and sees it in the context of the debate on the ‘amelioration’ of the condition of slaves (MWSL 1.417). In 1832, however, Canning’s words were appropriated by Thomas Dew in his defence of slavery in America (Young [2008], pp. 19–20).

‘The Caravanserail; or, A Collection of Eastern Stories’ Manuscript work, not in MWS’s hand but mentioned as conceivably by her  in CT xix n.12. The attribution is rejected definitively by Bennett (NSW 1.240).

Carlyle, Thomas (1795–1881) MWS knew Carlyle and his wife Jane Baillie Welsh Carlyle (1801–1866) by October 1839 (MWSL 3.418). She may first have met him at one of ∗Rogers’s breakfasts (Seymour 459) or she may have been introduced to both Carlyles by Leigh ∗Hunt (MWSL 2.329 n.4). She knew his History of the

  Casa Magni 

25

French Revolution (1837) (see Mirabeau, Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de). In 1818, on the basis of reviews, Carlyle thought that Frankenstein (which he believed to be PBS’s) ‘seems to be another unnatural disgusting fiction’ (Carlyle [1970-], vol. 1, p. 124). In German Romance: Specimens of its Chief Authors (1827) he refers in passing to ‘the gory profundities of Frankenstein and [∗Polidori’s] The Vampyre’ (Carlyle [1898], vol. 1, p. 2). Baldick studies his use of the monstrous in works including Sartor Resartus: ‘small-minded men conjuring up creatures of greater stature, and greater Truth, than themselves’ and then losing control of them (98).

Casa Magni House at San Terenzo, near Lerici, where MWS lived with PBS and Edward and Jane ∗Williams between late spring and July 1822. She was profoundly depressed in ‘this dungeon’ (MWSL 1.238), virtually ceased communication with PBS, miscarried and nearly died in mid-June. On 19 July ∗Trelawny brought confirmation of the death of PBS and Edward Williams. MWS describes Casa Magni and her state of mind in MWSL 1.244. The later account in PBS 1839 is influenced both by the memory of her depression and by the desire to describe a suitably dramatic and ill-omened place for the end of PBS’s life: there were fine trees and a beautiful view but ‘the sea came up to the door, a steep hill sheltered it behind’; in storms ‘the howling wind swept round our exposed house, and the sea roared unintermittingly, so that we almost fancied ourselves on board ship … The natives were wilder than the place … Had we been wrecked on an island in the South Seas, we could scarcely have felt ourselves further from civilization and comfort’ (NWS 2.325–6). The house survives, now near other buildings; since 1888, a street has separated it from the sea.

Catholicism MWS’s view of Roman Catholicism, and especially the power wielded by the church in predominantly Catholic countries, is on the whole hostile. She is satirical about ‘priestcraft’ and faith in externals in ‘Modern Italy’ (NSW 2.185–6); she talks of the need to end the power of the priests if reform is to happen in ‘Modern Italian Romances’ (LL 4.259); and the pernicious influence of the Inquisition is a frequent refrain in Spanish Lives. In ‘Montaigne’

26 C

(French Lives), dissenting from Montaigne’s dispraise of the Reformation, she salutes ‘the great and holy work of reformation, the greatest and (however stained by crime, the effect of the most cruel persecutions) the most beneficent change operated in modern times in human institutions’ (LL 2.310). She is more tolerant of individual Catholic devotion in ‘Pascal’ (French Lives) but feels that his ascetic rejection of human ties and pleasures is contrary to the true Christian emphasis on love and joy (LL 3.90). In Falkner, while stating that Catholic worship is ‘evil in its effects on the human mind’ (NSW 7.140), she concedes its outer magnificence, is aware of the difficulties faced by English Catholics before the emancipation acts of 1828–1829 (NSW 7.140, 227) and contrasts Sir Oswi Raby’s narrow adherence to the faith with Mrs Raby’s more tolerant approach. Rambles suggests further tolerance for everyday Catholic practices (NSW 8.353, 354); her writing about Italian religious art is free of anti-Catholic rhetoric. (On her response to the paintings, see further Moskal [2001].)

‘Cecil’ see Hahn-Hahn, Countess Ida von Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de (1547–1616) MWS heard PBS read Don Quixote (probably in an English translation) in autumn 1816 (MWSJ 139–45) and read at least some of it in Spanish in December 1820 (MWSJ 341). She humorously compares PBS to Don Quixote fighting windmills in MWSL 1.27; Falkner has ‘much of the Don Quixote about him’ (NSW 7.44). Moskal (2000) studies the liberal political context of MWS’s identification with Sancho Panza in HSWT; this identification, continued in later works, also enabled her ‘to negotiate … gender politics … by partly embracing and partly rejecting the “female Quixote” tradition associated with’ ∗Wollstonecraft (p. 18; see MWSL 1.499–500). Webster-Garrett (2000) looks at connections between Don Quixote and Frankenstein: in both ‘a newly conceived individual can rupture, by a pure and controlled act of will, the socio-symbolic orders used to define his or her place inside or outside of a community’ (p. 135). She examines Cervantes’ Zoraida as a source for Safie, with important differences between Safie’s ‘secular ideology of free will’ and the way in which Zoraida is overpowered by religious vision (p. 152); ‘While interrogating the ethics of agency’ Frankenstein ‘ponders whether a woman’s quest for selfdetermination must come at the cost of spiritual and moral authority’ (p. 153). See also Donahue (2009), pp. 183–4.

 Chamonix 

27

In Spanish Lives Cervantes has ‘as high a place for moral excellence as his genius has secured for him in the world of intellect’ (LL 2.135). He is ‘the writer of the most successful book in the world’ (LL 2.119). Undervalued by his contemporaries, he may be a medium for MWS’s feelings about’ ∗Godwin, PBS and ‘the vagaries of the writer’s life’ (Donahue [2009], p. 185). The main sources for ‘Cervantes’ are the lives by Antonio Pellicer (1797), Vicente de los Ríos (1780) and Louis Viardot (1836).

Chamonix Alpine village near Mont Blanc, now in France but in 1816 in the Kingdom of Sardinia. The Shelleys stayed here in July 1816 (see MWSJ 114–21). Frankenstein goes to ‘the valley of Chamounix’ (NSW 1.70–1), from which he sees ‘the supreme and magnificent Mont Blanc’ (71) and meets the creature on the ∗Mer de Glace. In this area, in The Last Man, ‘Sublime grandeur of outward objects soothed our hapless hearts, and were in harmony with our desolation’, and the plague at last ends (NSW 4.328, 330).

Chaucer, Geoffrey (c.1343–1400) Poet. MWS read The Canterbury Tales in 1815 (MWSJ 91) and probably Troilus and Criseyde (or possibly ∗Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida) in September 1820; PBS read the first book of Chaucer’s Troilus to her in June 1821 (MWSJ 333, 371). She read ∗Godwin’s The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer the Early English Poet (1803), probably not for the first time, in 1815 (MWSJ 91). Chaucer’s use of material from ∗Boccaccio and ∗Petrarch is considered in Italian Lives (LL 1.49–50, 57) and there is a brief reference to his ‘pathos, sweetness, and delicate truth’ in Rambles (NSW 8.299).

Chiabrera, Gabriello (1552–1638) Poet, subject of a brief entry in Italian Lives. MWS finds the style of his lyric poems ‘at once more original and beautiful than his ideas’ (LL 1.193).

28 C

‘The Choice’ Elegy written in early to mid-summer 1823. Two versions survive, the first published in 1876 and the second, dated ‘July 1823/Genoa’ and written into MWS’s journal, published in 1987 (MWSJ 490–4). The poem invokes PBS’s spirit, asks his forgiveness for her apparent coldness, and mourns William and Clara ∗Shelley, CC’s daughter Allegra, and Edward ∗Williams. LL 4.xxxi notes that the most important difference between the two texts is the omission of the last fourteen lines in the Journal version, probably because to end with Edward Williams seemed inappropriate. LL 4.xxix–xxx observes that the poem combines the tradition of ‘Choice’ poems, derived from Horace’s Satire 6 and describing ‘an ideal of rural contentment’, with ‘the confessional love-epistle written by a woman to an absent man’ and originating in Ovid’s Heroides. The notes to LL 4.117–22 and Allen (2007), pp.  221–2, 224–5, 228, examine the use of elements from PBS’s work. Allen analyses the poem as ‘an elegiac apostrophe to a revenant (a “spirit”) who is also an arrivant’; a call ‘to an Other from the past who might still arrive’ (p. 230).

‘Chronique du temps de Charles IX’ Review (headed ‘Art. XVI’), in the Westminster Review for October 1830, of ∗Mérimée’s 1572 Chronique du temps de Charles IX (1829). In this novel of the French Wars of Religion including the Massacre of St Bartholomew, ‘There is some carelessness, and a good deal of crudeness, but there are vigor, life, and wit’ (NSW 2.210). Much of the review consists of translated extracts; the author ‘sketches the reality of things—probably believing that truth carries with it its own moral, and that the best lesson a novelist can give is that of toleration’ (217).

Cicero, Marcus Tullius (106–43 BCE) Roman orator, philosopher and politician. MWS read some of his philosophical works in December 1816 and January 1817 and several of the orations in July 1820 (MWSJ 149–50, 154–5, 326–7). In November 1818, she visited his supposed tomb and villa ruins near Gaeta (MWSJ 241).

  Cieco da Ferrara 

29

In Lodore, Fanny Derham translates a passage from De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum on stoic and ‘dignified self-possession’ and later is seen reading Tusculan Disputations (NSW 6.224, 288).

Cieco da Ferrara (1450–1505) Poet considered briefly in Italian Lives. He possesses ‘ease of versification, and a considerable spring of poetic imagery and invention’ (LL 1.101).

Clairmont, Charles Gaulis (1795–1850) MWS’s stepbrother, son of Mary Jane ∗Godwin and Charles Gaulis. He rowed up the Thames with the Shelleys in summer 1816 and visited them in Italy in autumn 1819. For much of his adult life he worked in Vienna, eventually becoming Professor of English at the University in 1839, and was out of contact with MWS between 1829 and 1845—see CC 461–2 and 467 n.3.

Clairmont, Clara Mary Jane (Claire) (1798–1879) MWS’s stepsister, daughter of Mary Jane ∗Godwin and Sir John Lethbridge (see Stafford [2011–2014]). She was known as Jane until 1814 and then as Clara or Clary and later Claire. Her relationship with MWS was never easy; according to Jane, Lady ∗Shelley, MWS told her ‘She has been the bane of my life ever since I was three years old!’ (Marshall [1889], volume 2, p. 312). In childhood she and MWS probably competed for William ∗Godwin’s approval; ‘in our family’, CC told Jane ∗Williams, ‘if you cannot write an epic poem or a novel that by its originality knocks all others on the head, you are a despicable creature not worth acknowledging’ (CC 295). Tension between CC and MWS was much increased by their living together, with PBS, for long periods between 1814 and 1822. In May 1815, just before CC went away to Lynmouth, MWS refers to her, sarcastically, as PBS’s ‘friend’ and ‘the lady’ (MWSJ 78); in December 1816, she is satisfied with ‘a garden & absentia Clariae’ (MWSL 1.22). PBS took a great interest in her and she became emotionally (and financially) dependent on him; whether their relations were at

30 C

any point sexual remains unknown, although MWS strongly denied it in 1821 (MWSL 1.206–7; see also CCJ 97 n.7). In 1817 CC’s daughter by ∗Byron, Allegra (called at first Alba), was born. Byron’s insistence on retaining custody of the child, and sending her to board at the convent of Bagnacavallo in 1821, left the Shelleys in a difficult position, attempting to console CC and negotiating for her, with difficulty, some access to Allegra. She died at Bagnacavallo in April 1822. CC joined her brother, Charles ∗Clairmont, in Vienna in 1822, went to ∗Russia to work as a governess in 1824, and lived mainly abroad until 1846 and again from 1859. Correspondence with MWS continued; she wrote, MWS told her, ‘the most amusing & clever letters in the world’ (MWSL 3.48). CC felt herself a truer disciple of ∗Wollstonecraft than MWS, retaining ∗Trelawny’s admiration for her radical views. She was angered by MWS’s failure to share her unequivocal hatred of Byron (see e.g. CC 341). She claimed in the late 1820s that MWS had ‘given up every hope of imaginary excellence, and has compromised all the nobler parts of her nature … and has sneaked in upon any terms she could get into society’ (CCJ 432). Later some difficulties remained. MWS said in 1836 that ‘she poisoned my life when young’; she respects and pities CC now but ‘she still has the faculty of making me more uncomfortable than any human being’ (MWSL 2.271.) When planning to visit her in Paris in 1843 she was anxious to establish that, unlike last time, she ‘would prefer being in rooms of my own’ and her ‘visits … must be left independant [sic] & unshackled’ (MWSL 3.90–1). CC broke off relations with MWS in 1849, blaming her for the hasty marriage of her niece Clara to ∗Knox, who she claimed had been MWS’s lover (see CC 503–10). See also: ‘The Pole’. Further reading: Coleman (1999).

Clarke, Mary Cowden (1809–1898) Writer and Shakespearean scholar, daughter of Vincent ∗Novello. In Recollections of Writers (1878), she and her husband, Charles Cowden Clarke (1787–1877) describe MWS’s participation in musical evenings at the Novellos’ and her appearance at the time with golden hair, ‘marble-white shoulders and arms’, ‘thoughtful, earnest eyes’ and mouth ‘with a certain close-compressed and decisive expression while she listened, and a relaxation into fuller redness and mobility when speaking’.

  Cloudesley; A Tale 

31

Cloudesley; A Tale Novel by ∗Godwin (1830), reviewed anonymously by MWS in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (May 1830). She praises the coherent and complete development of the work: like his other novels, ‘This tale contains a train of events, each naturally flowing one from the other, and each growing in importance and dignity as they proceed. We have no extraneous ornaments; no discursive flights’ (NSW 2.204). ‘We close the book … with a compassion for the criminal, and a love or admiration for the innocent, at once elevating and delightful’ (206).

Cobbett, William (1763–1835) Radical journalist, often distrusted by more liberal reformers. Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register appeared between 1802 and 1835. MWS felt that his attack on the ‘Boroughmongers’ (Cobbett’s Weekly no. 23, 6 September 1817) encourages bloody revolution, a desire in ‘the multitude’ for revenge; ‘I like him not—I fear he is a bad man’ (MWSL 1.49). ∗Hunt quoted her comments as those of ‘A lady of what is called a masculine understanding’ in The Examiner for 5 October 1817 (see MWSL 1.53 and 54 n.2). In 1819 she asked ∗Gisborne to send her a copy of Cobbett’s A Year’s Residence in the United States of America (1818). She also refers to his History of the Protestant Reformation (1824–1827), whose ‘vituperation’ is parroted by Cobbett’s son, James (Crook [2009], pp. 43, 49; see ‘Journal of a Tour in Italy, and also in a part of France and Switzerland’). See also: The Last Man.

Colburn and Bentley Henry Colburn (1784/5–1855) published The Last Man in 1826, and, the same year, a Frankenstein which was probably a reissue of the 1823 second edition (MYR 9.102). He was in partnership with Richard Bentley (1794–1871) from 1829 to 1832. Colburn and Bentley’s Standard Novels series provided, from 1831, cheap editions of works: either reissues or, where possible, revisions by the author. Early volumes included the 1831 Frankenstein,

32 C

∗Godwin’s Caleb Williams and St. Leon, and ∗Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans; after 1832 Bentley continued the series with many other novels, among them ∗Austen’s. After the end of the partnership in 1832 MWS and her father were published, or sought publication, by Bentley rather than Colburn, perhaps because ∗Ollier remained with Bentley (see MWSL 2.175 n.1 and SC V.127). Bentley published Lodore; MWS originally intended Falkner for him and in 1839 suggested, unsuccessfully, that he might issue Valperga in the Standard series.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772–1834) Poet, philosopher, journalist and critic. MWS knew him from early childhood as a friend of ∗Godwin (see WGD, ‘Coleridge, Samuel Taylor’; Coleridge [1956–1971], vol. 1, pp.  553, 580, 588). She engaged closely with his work: according to tradition, she and CC hid, as children, in order to hear him recite The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Rossetti [1890], p. 18; later [NSW 2.302] she would hear PBS recite the poem ‘with wild energy’.) She attended seven of Coleridge’s 1811–1812 lectures on ∗Shakespeare and ∗Milton (WGD, ‘Lectures’) and was at the opening night of his tragedy Remorse on 23 January 1813. She made a transcript of ‘France: an Ode’ and ‘Fire, Famine and Slaughter’ (SC VII.1–8), probably in 1815 or early 1816 (see SC VII.8–9). She heard and read Christabel several times in the summer of 1816 (Polidori [1911], p.  128; MWSJ 131). (For some possible links between Christabel and Frankenstein, see Minot and Minot [2004]. Sunstein 122, 32, sees the poem as ‘to Mary a poeticization of her own childhood’— separated from her father by ‘an ingratiating, secretly deformed witch’ or stepmother.) She quotes or refers to ‘Fears in Solitude’ (NSW 7.128; Polidori [1911], p. 113 says she recited it on 1 June 1816), Wallenstein (NSW 4.111, 208, 5.269, 8.135, 231), Zapolya (MWSJ 184), ‘Tranquillity’ (MWSL 2.196) and The Statesman’s Manual and Aids to Reflection (MWSJ 153, 547); see also MWSJ 90, 146–7. The Ancient Mariner and its exploration of solitariness, fear, guilt and the sublime remained particularly important to her. Frankenstein feels unable to marry Elizabeth with ‘this deadly weight yet hanging [albatrosslike] round my neck, and bowing me to the ground’ (NSW 1.117); Frankenstein and the Mariner tell tales of warning to Walton and the Wedding Guest; and Walton’s brief reference to ‘the land of mist and

  Colletta, Pietro 

33

snow’ and killing no albatross is expanded, in 1831, into his attribution of ‘my attachment to, my passionate enthusiasm for, the dangerous mysteries of ocean, to that production of the most imaginative of modern poets’ (NSW 1.14, 184). Both works, as Lau (2009b) says, ‘condemn selfish ambition and advocate a loving, harmonious co-existence with people and other living things’ (p. 78); for Mathilda nature, expanding the soul, was ‘the sight of the lovely water snakes to the bewitched mariner’ (NSW 2.43; see lines 273–87). Community and love are undercut, however, by ‘experiences of radical, irremediable solitude’: the Mariner ‘Alone, alone …’ (line 232), the creature ‘wretched, helpless, and alone’ (NWS 1.97), and Frankenstein regarding himself as ‘uniquely miserable and isolated … in his guilt and remorse’ (Lau [2009b], p. 80). Lau (2009b) argues more generally that ‘the two writers were profoundly akin in their temperaments and outlooks’ (p. 77). In 1818 MWS condemned Coleridge for writing for the conservative Courier (MWSL 1.75), but her positive response to him in January 1824 seems more representative: ‘Seeing Coleridge last night reminded me forcibly of past times—his beautiful descriptions, metaphysical talk & subtle distinctions reminded me of Shelley’s conversations’ (MWSJ 474). Thoughts of the past—but also no doubt of Coleridge, who has prompted these thoughts—lead on to the hope that ‘some gleams of past entrancement may visit me’ (MWSJ 474): she values him for the imaginative power of his person and his poems, sharing with him, particularly in Frankenstein, Walton’s ‘love for the marvellous’ (NSW 1.184) and figuring her own imagination as ‘my Kubla Khan—my Stately pleasure ground through which a mighty river ran down to a sunless sea’ (MWSJ 543; see ‘Kubla Khan’, lines 1–5). Further reading: Levy (2004).

Colletta, Pietro (1775–1831) General and historian. MWS used his history of ∗Naples between 1734 and 1825 in Rambles. In spite of his occasional bias, she recommends his eye-­ witness testimony (NSW 8.338). His account of the execution of Joachim Murat (1771–1815), King of Naples, is ‘one of the finest pieces of writing in the world—full of a mournful dignity, that renders its pathos touching, and gives grandeur to its scorn’ (NSW 8.337).

34 C

Colonna, Vittoria (1490/2–1547) Poet. ‘Vittoria Colonna’ opens with an account of other notable Italian ‘women who aspired to literary fame’ (LL 1.174). (The subjects of Italian Lives are, otherwise, all male.) Colonna herself was ‘the woman of all others who conferred, by her virtues, talents, and beauty, honour on her sex’ (LL 1.175). Contrastingly, the reviewer in The Spectator for 31 October 1835 claims that her ‘sex and conventional rank, rather than any actual exhibition of ability, procured her a place in the present volumes’ (p. 1945). There is a possible element of self-identification when MWS describes Colonna’s sorrowing, faithful widowhood (LL 1.177). But Tilar Mazzeo points out that framing her ‘within a tradition of learned ladies, and the attention paid to her political judgement, sense of honour and … worthiness to be considered alongside Petrarch, balance the emphasis elsewhere on female domestic virtue and devoted womanhood’ (LL 1.lii). Sources include Contessa Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi’s life (1800) and William Roscoe’s Leo the Tenth (1805) (LL 1.lii).

Condorcet, Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de (1743–1794) French philosopher and revolutionary. ‘Condorcet’ in French Lives draws closely on Alphonse Rabbe’s Biographie universelle et portative (1836) for material on his career (LL 3.xx) but probes more independently his utopian belief in human perfectibility—a belief shared, LL 3.xx points out, with MWS’s father, her husband and people known to her mother in 1792–1793. Like other philosophes, Condorcet failed to take into account the nature of human passions (LL 3.368) and like other politicians in the ∗French Revolution ‘he wished to treat mankind like puppets, and fancied that it was only necessary to pull particular strings to draw them within the circle of order and reason’ (LL 3.375–6). But his consistency and his ‘Benevolence, justice, and attachment to the cause of freedom’ are admirable (LL 3.382). His atheism is made more palatable to readers of ∗Lardner’s Cyclopaedia by the stress laid on the anti-Catholic, rather than simply anti-religious, aspect of his thought (LL 3.372). Condorcet’s wife Sophie, is mentioned briefly as ‘the author of some philosophical works’ (LL 3.382); further discussion was perhaps prevented by lack of time or space (LL 3.xx).

  ‘The Convent of Chaillot: or, La Vallière and Louis XIV’ 

35

‘The Convent of Chaillot: or, La Vallière and Louis XIV’ Story published anonymously, late in 1827, in The Keepsake for MDCCCXXVIII. MWS is almost certainly the author: see LL 4.lxxxiii–iv. Louise de la Vallière (1644–1710) was the King’s principal mistress between 1661 and 1667. Here she makes possible the marriage of her friends Clemence Beaumelle and Theodore de Blanzac, but, finding that she has fallen in love with Theodore, leaves Orléans for a position as a maid of honour to the Duchess of Orléans at St Germain. Here she is successfully wooed by Louis XIV.  Before Louise succumbs, Clemence visits the convent of Chaillot and, coming upon the King with her friend, begs him to spare her. Louise tells her that she cannot resist the King now, although she might have been able to if she had ‘earlier asked and received’ her friend’s support. Later, after Theodore has died and Louise has been superseded as Louis’s mistress by Mme de Montespan, the friends—Louise as nun, Clemence as boarder—are reunited at the convent. The tale was published with, and probably written to accompany, an engraving by Charles Heath after Alfred Chalon corresponding to the scene with the King and the two women at the convent. The historical basis of the tale enables more sympathetic treatment of La Vallière’s extra-marital liaison than would be likely in a contemporary setting.

Cooke, Thomas Potter (1786–1864) The first actor to play Frankenstein’s creature, in ∗Peake’s Presumption; or the Fate of Frankenstein in 1823 and in Le Monstre et le magicien in 1826 (see Frankenstein on Stage.) His parts included the Byronic Ruthven in a dramatic version of ∗Polidori’s The Vampyre (English Opera House, August 1820) and Vanderdecken in Edward Fitzball’s The Flying Dutchman (Adelphi, April 1826). According to The Illustrated London News in 1853 (p.  319), ‘others played ghosts and demons with unquestionable success; but how mechanically and solidly. … It was he who first infused them with a true poetic element—gave them a dreamy indistinctness—a vague suggestive shadow, which, while it chained the senses, set the imagination loose’ (quoted by Michael Slater, DNB 13.170).

36 C

Cooper, James Fenimore (1789–1851) American novelist, resident in Europe from 1826 to 1833. MWS, in her review of The ∗Bravo (1831), also refers to The Spy (1821), The Pilot (1824), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Red Rover (1827), The Borderers (1829) and The Water Witch (1830); and in MWSL 1.481 to Lionel Lincoln (1825). LL 4.xxi rejects, as ‘not in her style at all’, the tentative attribution to MWS by Sunstein 414 of ‘Living Literary Characters, No.IV.  James Fenimore Cooper’ in the New Monthly Magazine for April 1831.

Corneille, Pierre (1606–1684) Dramatist. MWS read Le Cid, Horace, Cinna and Polyeucte in June 1818 (MWSJ 213). ‘Corneille’, in French Lives, includes discussion of these and the other plays. The effect of the unities of time, place and action is consistently regarded as unfortunate, but Corneille’s energy and force of expression redeem his best work. Before ∗Racine’s ‘elegance and pathos’, Corneille ‘in heroic verse and majestic situation’ imparted ‘a dignity and simplicity to the French drama afterwards wholly lost’ (LL 2.330). He was a true poet—‘a man whose heart is set on the ideal’—and the ‘political struggles and civil wars, in which his youth was spent, gave a sort of republican loftiness to his mind, energy without fierceness, somewhat at variance with the French character’ (LL 2.348). The main sources for the life were Fontenelle’s Vie, ∗Voltaire’s prefaces to the plays, and editions of the works of Pierre and Thomas Corneille (LL 2.lvi)

‘Correspondence, Maxims and Reflections of Louis XVI’ Manuscript translation of part of Corréspondance politique et confidentielle inédite de Louis XVI … (Paris, 1803): spurious letters, written by royal propagandists, but with commentary by Helen Maria Williams rejecting the King’s position while condemning intemperate responses to him as an individual. (See LL 4.lviii–ix). (Williams also adds ‘supplementary’ letters intended to

  ‘Cry of War to the Greeks’ 

37

show Louis’ actions in a more hostile light.) The translation, which does not include Williams’s observations, is, at least as it survives, incomplete, beginning in the middle of Letter LXII. Markley provides evidence that MWS worked on ‘Correspondence’ in summer 1816, overlapping with, and then abandoned because of, work on Frankenstein (LL 4.lix–lx). Conceivably, it had some influence on the epistolary element in the novel. Markley notes that ‘In French-speaking Geneva in 1816, providing a Girondist view of the French monarchy would have been a timely project, serving to dissociate the ideas of the French Revolution from its … degeneration into the Terror’ (LL 4.lx).

‘Cry of War to the Greeks’ Translation by MWS and PBS of Alexandros Ypsilantis’ call to the Greeks to take arms at the beginning of the Greek Revolution. It was completed in early April 1821, almost certainly with ∗Mavrokordatos’ help (Beaton [2013], pp. 70–9) and sent to the Examiner and the Morning Chronicle in the hope of publication. It did not appear because both newspapers had already published another English version (BSM xxii Part Two 29). The manuscript is in MWS’s hand with corrections by PBS; he knew more Greek than her, but Beaton (2013) argues that the translation may be mainly from Mavrokordatos’ French. For further discussion of authorship, see BSM xx Part Two 29–31 and LL 4.lxxix.

‘Cupid and Psyche’ Translation of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses or Asinus Aureus (The Golden Ass), IV.28-V.13. The princess Psyche, the attention paid to whose beauty has angered Venus, is told that she is to marry a fierce serpent but the bridegroom is, unknown to her, the god Cupid. Her disobeying of his instructions will lead, after the passage in question, to her banishment but eventually she will succeed in winning Venus’ pardon and regaining her husband. MWS was reading Apuleius in May 1817, began translating on 3 November that year, and may have stopped work by 16 (see MWSJ 169–70 and LL 4.lxii). Markley in LL notes that ‘The treatment of the … funereal bridal bed and the monstrous bridegroom … is a strange inversion of the Frankensteinian situation. Perhaps after writing Frankenstein Mary Shelley needed to immerse herself in a horror-dispelling fable of love and delight’ (4.lxiv). Perhaps

38 C

a­ ccordingly, she ‘mollifies the more salacious or bawdy passages’ in the original (LL 4.lxv): see for example LL 4.289 notes j, k. She also ‘pares down Apuleius’ wordiness’ (LL 4.lxiv). The piece remains, however, evidently unrevised. Markley cites examples of the popularity of the Psyche story in the early nineteenth century including Mary Tighe’s Psyche (1807), ∗Godwin’s version in The Pantheon … (1806) and, later, Keats’s ‘Ode to Psyche’ (1820) (LL 4.lxiv). Apuleius’ version is one of the ‘allegories of the soul’s journey through earthly suffering to union with the divine’ which influences Mathilda’s narrative (NSW 2.2). Further reading: Markley (2003).

Curran, Amelia (1775–1847) Painter, daughter of ∗Godwin’s friend the Irish lawyer and politician John Philpot Curran. MWS knew her in Rome in April to June 1819 and she painted portraits of her, PBS, William ∗Shelley and CC. ∗Trelawny took charge of the MWS portrait and failed to return it at her request; it is now lost. Rossetti (1890) apparently saw it and judged that it did not give ‘an idea of the beauty and charm which are constantly referred to by her friends … Her oval face is here given with the high forehead’, the eyes are grey, ‘tending to brown near the iris’, the mouth ‘thin and hard … while a certain stiffness of pose is not what one would expect in the high-strung, sensitive Mary Shelley’ (p. 139).

‘Cyrus Fragment’ Manuscript fragment of a history of the ancient world. Chaldea and India are credited for their achievements in astronomy while the Egyptians, like the Chinese, sank into slavery and superstition. Cyrus is seen, on the grounds of the admittedly unreliable testimony of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, as virtuous compared with other non-Greek despots; at the end of the piece MWS is about to turn ‘with pleasure’ to the free and independent Greeks. The date of composition is possibly 1815 (LL 4.xlix–l).

D

Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) Poet. MWS records frequent reading of La Divina Commedia between 1817 and 1822, particularly in 1818–1819 (see MWSJ 643–4); she read La Vita Nuova in early 1821 (MWSJ 351, 352–3). There are many references to the Commedia in her letters and fiction, especially Valperga—see particularly Euthanasia’s account of its effect on her ‘enthusiasm for the liberties of my country’ (NSW 3.81–2)—and she was frustrated that ‘Dante’ in Italian Lives had been taken by Sir James Montgomery. In ‘Petrarch’ she contrasts Dante with the other best known Italian poet: the ‘force, beauty, and truth’ of Dante’s descriptions and ‘the sympathetic feeling that vivifies his touches of human passion, is of a different style from the outpouring of sentiment, and earnest dwelling on the writer’s own emotions, which form the soul of ∗Petrarch’s verses’. And while Petrarch was ‘amiable and conciliating’ Dante was ‘a proud, high-spirited, unyielding man: his haughty soul bent itself to God and the sense of virtue only; he loved deeply, but it was as a poet and a boy; and his after-life, spent in adversity, is tinged only with sombre colours. He possessed the essentials of a hero’ (LL 1.44–5). Having re-read Purgatorio and Paradiso in ∗Italy in 1840 she discusses Dante as ‘an elemental poet’. She prefers ‘The pathetic tenderness of the Purgatorio’ and ‘the sublime hymns to heavenly love, contained in the Paradiso’ to Inferno, where there are finer passages but the subject is ‘so painful and odious’ (NSW 8.124–5). Further reading: Palacio.

© The Author(s) 2019 M. Garrett, The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Palgrave Literary Dictionaries, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56639-3_4

39

40 D

Darwin, Erasmus (1731–1802) Scientist, physician and poet of ‘proto-evolutionary outlook’ (Shelley [1994a], p. 252), referred to in the 1818 Preface and 1831 Introduction to Frankenstein and in chapter 9 of Mathilda (NSW 1.7, 179, 2.48). His alleged animation of ‘a piece of vermicelli in a glass case’ (NSW 1.179) derives from his Additional Note on ‘Spontaneous Vitality of Microscopic Animals’ in The Temple of Nature (1803) (see NSW 1.179 n.c); other material relevant to Frankenstein includes the Additional Note on ‘Chemical Theory of Electricity and Magnetism’. MWS is very likely to have been familiar also with Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1791) and Zoonomia (1794–1796), copies of which were owned by PBS (PBSL 1.129, 342). Further reading: Roberts (1990).

Davy, Sir Humphry (1778–1829) Prominent scientist, inventor, and lecturer who isolated potassium, sodium, calcium, and strontium. In October to November 1816 MWS read either the Introduction to his Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1812) or his A Discourse, Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry (1802) (MWSJ 142–4; Crouch [1978], p. 35 and n.2). Frankenstein’s creation of life from dead matter may reflect Davy’s early interest in galvanism and electricity. Waldman’s ‘panegyric upon modern chemistry’ (NSW 1.32) recalls passages in the Discourse; Frankenstein’s scientific ambition reflects ‘in highly egotistical terms’ Davy’s picture of the scientist as adventurer (Smith [2016c], p. 70), of one given ‘powers which may be almost called creative; which have enabled him, by his experiments to interrogate nature with power’ (Davy [1839], vol. 2, p. 319).

‘The Death of Love’ Poem entered by MWS, on 19 November 1831, in the album of Anna Birkbeck (c.1794–1851). The personified Love has died—he ‘pined like one of food bereft’—but his image ‘like a palid [sic] ghost may rise’ to gild her dreams (LL 4.136–7). The poem was first published in Bennett (1997b), pp. 72–3.

  Dickens, Charles 

41

Dickens, Charles (1812–1870) Novelist. There are echoes of Frankenstein in Great Expectations (1860–1861); see Lanone (2016) and Baldick 111, 117–20. In chapter 27 Pip makes a boy a ‘monster’ by dressing him as an inappropriately grand kind of servant; needing food and something to do, ‘with both of those horrible requirements he haunted my existence’, becoming ‘an avenging phantom’. In chapter 40, with reference to Magwitch, ‘The imaginary student pursued by the misshapen creature he had impiously made, was not more wretched than I, pursued by the creature who had made me, and recoiling from him with a stronger repulsion, the more he admired me and the fonder he was of me’. There is another possible recollection of Frankenstein in the preface to the cheap edition (1850) of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–1844), where Dickens defends his presentation of Jonas Chuzzlewit’s ‘sordid coarseness and brutality’ on the basis of his ‘early education’, finds this sequence applicable to the whole of society, and asks the reader to ‘judge whether those are monsters who disgrace our streets, people our hulks and penitentiaries, and overcrowd our penal colonies, or are creatures whom we have deliberately suffered to be bred for misery and ruin’.

Dillon, Henry-Augustus Dillon Lee, Viscount (1777–1832) Irish writer, raconteur, and political figure. He knew MWS by early April 1827 (see MWSL 1.573 n.5). They became close enough for him to tell her, in a letter of 1828, that at first he doubted her sincerity in commenting on his poem Eccelino da Romano ‘for your manner is reserved’. He goes on to say that he would have thought, on the basis of reading her work, that she was ‘outpouringly enthusiastic, rather indiscreet, and even extravagant, but you are cool, quiet, and feminine to the last degree – I mean in delicacy of manner and expression’ (MWSJ 606).

Dionigi, Marianna Candidi (1756–1826) The ‘Roman lady, a painter and authoress, very old – very miserly & very mean’ (MWSL 1.95) whose Sunday conversazioni the Shelleys attended at 310 Via del Corso in March and April 1819.

42 D

Dippel, (Johann) Konrad (1673–1734) Theologian and alchemist, associated with Castle Frankenstein, near Darmstadt. Florescu (1975) argues that MWS could have visited the castle in 1814 and heard local legends about Dippel (pp. 58–63, 78–87, 92–3). Among his interests may have been ‘the chemical or other processes that engender life’ (p. 84).

‘A Dirge’ Poem ‘By the Author of “Frankenstein”’ published in November 1830 in The Keepsake for MDCCCXXXI: ‘[T]he best thing I ever wrote in the Keepsake’ (MWSL 2.246). It is dated November 1827 in manuscript and described as ‘To the Air of “My Phillida, Adieu, Love!”’ (LL 4.xxxiii; for the tune see The Bee: a Selection of the Most Esteemed Vocal Productions Both Antient and Modern [1805], pp. 22–3). MWS copied the poem in a letter to ∗Gisborne of 11 June 1835 (MWSL 2.247–8) and included a revised version with her ‘Note on Poems Written in 1822’ in PBS 1839. The dirge is for a man, evidently PBS, who has died in a shipwreck. (In a letter to ∗Gisborne of September 1822 the roar of the sea is already ‘his dirge’: MWSL 1.260.) Sea-nymphs chant the dirge and a lament echoes ‘From Ocean’s caverns’ while the speaker keeps lonely watch and for ever weeps (LL 4.132). The sea-nymphs ringing the knell of the allegedly drowned Alonzo in The Tempest I.ii.405 are an influence. The revisions for PBS 1839, including the omission of the repeated ‘love’, ‘make the poem less plangent and radically alter its relationship to the singing voice’ (LL 4.xxxiii). See also: Poe, Edgar Allan.

Disraeli, Benjamin (1804–1881) Novelist and politician. MWS met him in the mid-1830s, probably through his wife (from 1839) Mary Anne (1792–1872), whom she knew by 1834. At that time she was married to her first husband, Wyndham Lewis, and was the lover of George Beauclerk, Aubrey ∗Beauclerk’s brother (see MWSL 2.291 n.1). MWS read The Young Duke (1831) (MWSL 2.135).

  Dods, Mary Diana 

43

Contarini Fleming (1832) (MWSL 2.164: ‘I like parts of it excessively’) and no doubt other of his novels. In 1837, soon after he became an MP, she asked him ‘Are you meditating your Maiden speech? I wonder if you will be what you can be. – Were your heart in your career it would be a brilliant one’ (MWSL 2.290).

Dods, Mary Diana see Robinson family Dormouse see Nicknames Dracula see Stoker, Bram (Abraham) Drama and Theatre MWS frequently went to plays and operas, mainly in ∗London, and knew actors including ∗Payne and Fanny ∗Kemble. She wrote two pieces in dramatic form, Proserpine and Midas. Pascoe (2003) argues for their stage-­worthiness and for the theatrical nature (pp. 188–9) of her novels. (See also Bunnell [2002].) PBS originally suggested that she, rather than he, should write a play about Charles I or the Cenci (NSW 2.282–3). Her later attempts to write tragedy were discouraged by ∗Godwin, ∗Payne and ∗Procter—see MWSJ 475 n.1 and MWSL 1.413 n.5. But in 1835 she still felt that ‘I could have written a good tragedy – but not now’ (MWSL 2.246). See also: Frankenstein on Stage; Kean, Edmund; Renaissance Drama.

Drawing MWS’s early drawing teachers possibly included John Linnell (1792–1882) (see Sunstein 50 and n.9) and Hannah ∗Hopwood. In December 1816 she took further lessons in Bath (MWSL 1.22 and 23n.3) and in 1819 in ∗Rome (MWSJ 254–65), where she often notes ‘Draw’. In November 1821 she wanted high quality drawing paper ‘for miniatures’, HB pencils and ‘a cake of carmine’ (MWSL 1.211). Among the occasional sketches in the letters are a small caricature to illustrate to Marianne ∗Hunt the absurd way Pisan women wear their silk hats (MWSL 1.137). See also MWSJ 144 and n.3, 145, and illustration opposite 178. For a possible self-portrait, see Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft: Portraits and Other Visual Representations. In ∗Genoa in 1822–1823, she remembers, her drawing, together with her studies, ‘soothed me’ (MWSJ 471).

44 D

‘The Dream’ Tale by ‘the Author of Frankenstein’ published in November 1831  in The Keepsake for MDCCCXXXII. It was reprinted in the Philadelphia annual Leaflets of Memory for 1846 and in Friendship’s Offering for 1855. After the French civil wars at the end of the sixteenth century, Countess Constance de Villeneuve is left in mourning, the last of her line. King Henri IV urges her to marry; he will allow her to enter a convent instead only if he cannot bring her ‘inducement sufficient to change her design’ (CT 155). In dejection, she wanders to a ‘verdurous recess’ in the park of her château, holding the King’s letter and thinking of ‘the mad dream of happiness’ which was once hers. (MWS substituted this green daylight setting for the original ‘lofty halls’ and ‘huge dim apartments’ in order to accommodate the engraving of Constance with the letter in The Keepsake, by Charles Heath after Louisa Sharpe: see CT 383, 384–5). Here Gaspar de Vaudemont comes to her; she renounced his love because during the wars his family was involved in the death of her father and brother. He announces his intention of going to fight in Palestine if she will not change her mind. She is left in an agony of grief but suddenly it occurs to her to try sleeping on ‘St. Catherine’s couch’, a narrow ledge above the Loire where, it is said, ‘the saint deigns to direct her votaries in dreams’ (158). When the King arrives, she asks to postpone her decision for a day. Henri, puzzled, gets her attendant to tell him about the St Catherine scheme and as a result Gaspar keeps vigil beneath, knowing that ‘love for him, had led her to that perilous couch’ (163). She starts up from her sleep, saying that she will save Gaspar, but he saves her by catching her before she can fall into the river; she had dreamed of him as the suffering, chained captive he would become if he went to Palestine. They are married in St Catherine’s chapel and she later explains that her dream taught her ‘what life and what death was’ and ‘how wicked and vain was that false philosophy which placed virtue and good in hatred and unkindness’ (165). Robinson points to ‘many antecedents’ for the story in ∗Keats’s ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ (1820): ‘a heroine who is uncertain about human love, who is separated from her lover by a family feud, and who employs a superstitious religious ritual to determine the future object of her love’ (CT 383). A dream of the lover blends, in each case, with his actual presence. Keats’s Madeline, however, suffers much less emotional conflict than Constance. Constance has a much more extensive minatory dream and reaches a more explicitly moral position (CT 164–5) about the claims of love over a ‘false philosophy’. The feud in Romeo and Juliet is no doubt a common source for the two works; Juliet, more like Constance than Madeline, must take a decision to side against specific family members, among whom her cousin Tybalt is killed by her lover

 Dresden 

45

as Constance’s brother may have been by Gaspar (CT 157). Brewer (2001) points out that her dream has a positive function, unlike ‘the prophetic nightmares of Frankenstein, Mathilda and Lionel [The Last Man], suggesting that dreams can allow one to overcome the inhibitions and conflicts that impede the conscious mind’ (p. 207). Henri IV (King of France 1589–1610) is renowned in history and legend for tolerance and bonhomie and as a gallant lover. Here he takes a benevolent interest in the lovers and prides himself on understanding women (158–9). Henri, already celebrated in such works as ∗Voltaire’s La Henriade, became especially popular in France after 1814, promoted partly by his newly restored Bourbon descendants; a reconciler King was useful to the new regime. He was familiar in paintings by, and engravings after, Ingres and Bonington, whose Henri IV and the Spanish Ambassador was shown at the Paris Salon of November 1827-April 1828. ‘The Dream’ is set in and near Nantes perhaps with reference to Henri’s Edict of Nantes (1598) which, like the end of the tale, enshrined tolerance, an end to feuding. But ‘The Dream’ begins with an acknowledgement that his ‘accession and conversion [to Catholicism]’ did not end ‘private feuds … between those now apparently united’ (p. 153); one implication of the title ‘The Dream’ may be the ideality or wishful thinking of the happy ending. MWS was aware that the king would be assassinated and his edict later, in 1685, revoked. Markley (1997) argues for the humorous bent of the story. It exaggerates ‘gothic conventions’ and pokes fun at such popular motifs as ‘the “constant” woman’ (p. 110).

Dresden German city, capital of the Kingdom of Saxony between 1806 and 1918. MWS stayed here for a month, in intense heat, in summer 1842.

Duvillard (Foggi), Elise, or Louise (1795-after 1822) Swiss nursemaid who worked for the Shelleys in 1816–1819. From 1820 she and her husband and former fellow-servant Paolo Foggi attempted to blackmail them, threatening to make known the alleged parentage of Elena Adelaide Shelley (1818–1820); Duvillard claimed that Elena was the daughter of PBS and CC.  MWS strongly denied this (MWSL 1.206–7) and Duvillard later withdrew the accusation.

E

Edgeworth, Maria (1768–1849) Novelist. MWS read Patronage (1814) and Castle Rackrent (1800) in 1816, Comic Dramas (1817) and Harrington, a tale, and Ormond, a tale (1817) in 1817, and Edgeworth’s and her father’s Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1820) in 1821 (MWSJ 141, 145, 171, 177, 372–3). In 1821 she notes that Edward ∗Williams ‘cannot endure Miss Edgeworth’s novels & is the opposite of a prude in every way’ (MWSL 1.180).

‘An Eighteenth-Century Tale’ Fragment of a story, beginning ‘In the Summer of the year 17-’. A lady has invited a group of visitors to her house by the ∗Thames between ∗Marlow and Henley. Topics of conversation include the differences between England and other countries. One guest, Maria Graham, agrees to tell ‘the strange events’ of her life on the condition that her fellows will also tell their own stories. With the frame established, she begins her account—she was orphaned and looked after by her aunt. The idea of each member of a group telling a tale was popularized by ∗Boccaccio in The Decameron. The comparison of countries is like that in ‘Recollections of Italy’ (1824) and may be its source (CT 398). 1819 or soon afterwards is the most likely date, as for ‘Valerius: the Reanimated Roman’ in

© The Author(s) 2019 M. Garrett, The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Palgrave Literary Dictionaries, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56639-3_5

47

48 E

the same notebook (see CT 397, 398). ‘An Eighteenth-Century Tale’ was first published, and so titled, in CT.

‘The Elder Son’ Story by ‘Mrs. Shelley’ published late in 1834 in Heath’s Book of Beauty, 1835. Ellen, at the age of eighteen, is left with a fortune of £50,000 on the death of her rather austere clergyman father. She goes to live with her very different uncle, Sir Richard Gray, who means well towards her but lives for ‘The world, society and pleasure’ (CT 246). In Sir Richard’s absence, her cousin Vernon arrives, declares his love for Ellen and exerts so much pressure on her that she eventually agrees to marry him once she is of age. Vernon’s aim is to obtain her fortune; he also, unintentionally, develops a passion for her, ‘making him the slave of love—of a girl whom he despised’ (249). He becomes demanding and jealous and Ellen struggles internally, her ‘soul … in arms against him, even while I submitted to his control’ (250). He continues to put pressure on her to go through with their engagement. When she meets his elder brother, the open-hearted Clinton, they feel at once in harmony. Sir Richard, who knows nothing of the arrangement with Vernon, asks if Ellen will marry Clinton and she realizes, in agony, that she loves him. She explains the situation to Clinton, who honourably agrees that she should keep her promise to his brother. As they are saying their sad farewells, the furious Vernon confronts them and scorns Clinton as the bastard son of their father: it is now revealed that Clinton was born before Sir Richard married the mother. His estate is entailed on Vernon but he allowed Clinton to think that he was legitimate. The ‘wrongful, penitent father’ (262) will protect Ellen from Vernon’s further importunities. In the end, after a time living with Caroline, Lady Hythe, Ellen is able to marry Clinton, now an army officer; Sir Richard turns from spendthrift to saver, building a legacy for Clinton; Ellen knows of Vernon only that he ‘lives the life of the rich in England’ and has not married (265). Heath’s Book of Beauty (1833–1849), edited by Lady Blessington from the 1834 volume onwards, included pictures almost exclusively of aristocratic women with poems and stories related to them. Here the illustration of the sleeping Ellen (257, painted by Henry Wyatt and engraved by J.  Henry Robinson) is worked into the tale to show, or point to the risk of, male possessiveness and the objectification of women. Clinton sketches it while Ellen sleeps but she insists that he cannot keep it and he agrees that she is right (257). Clinton is prepared to give up even her likeness while Vernon ‘demanded me as a right’ (261).

  Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) 

49

When Ellen feels abandoned, unable to trust any man (she thinks, if briefly, that even Clinton is not to be relied on) it is a woman, Lady Hythe, who comes to her rescue, giving her the stable social position she lacked in her uncle’s shifting household. Lady Hythe is ‘a feminine likeness of Clinton; the same active kindness of heart, gentleness of temper, and adorable frankness’ (263). While Clinton is away in the army, she effectively substitutes for him until the couple can enter a secure marriage. In a further assertion of domestic values, the reformed Sir Richard is brought to live with them for his last months. Ellen later persuades Clinton to leave the army. It is the ‘unimportant events of domestic life’ which bring true ‘prosperity’ (265) as opposed to the solely financial prosperity (265) of Vernon or the wealth once misused by Sir Richard. Vernon threatened true prosperity and domestic harmony with his passion, male aggression and fortune-hunting and is accordingly banished, alone, to the margins of the story.

Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) (1819–1880) Novelist. Baldick 144 examines her use of a ‘stereotypical [Frankenstein-­ like] meddling scientist’ in ‘The Lifted Veil’ (1859) and, relatedly, her reworking of ‘the problem of scientific pride and irresponsibility’ in her treatment of Lydgate in Middlemarch (1871–1872) (193–4).

‘The English in Italy’ Essay in the Westminster Review for October 1826 (anonymous and untitled), reviewing the Marquess of Normanby’s The English in Italy (1825), Charlotte Anne Eaton’s novel Continental Adventures (1826) and Anna Brownell ∗Jameson’s Diary of an Ennuyée (1826). It combines assessments of these works with more personal responses to Italy—‘a few anecdotes of my own as sauce piquante’ (MWSL 1.527)—including accounts of ∗Pisa (NSW 2.154), agriculture and country life (154–7) and the attempted revolutions of 1820–1821 (151–2). Normanby describes ‘character and manners’ well (150) but he concludes his stories inappropriately, should have ‘introduced more of the country life of Italy’ (153, 154) and is guilty of ‘an offensive display of superiority of rank’ (163). (Schoina [2009] looks at how ‘Under the clever guise of self-­diminution,’

50 E

MWS’s challenge to his ‘authority as an Anglo-Italian appears less formidable; yet, in essence, it is an act of female self-assertion’ [p. 69].) Eaton writes with ‘great spirit’ and humour but ‘mixes real scenes with fictitious ones … in the mode of a common novel’ and is resolutely English where Normanby uses ‘the manners of the natives [to] form the ground-work of the tales’ (159). It is annoying that Jameson’s work presents itself as a real diary (see further Webster-Garrett [2007], pp. 75–6)—‘a trick of art that excited our real sympathy’ (161)—but it is enthusiastic, vivid and entertaining. ‘The few traits recorded of Italian manners are felicitously seized, and the English party is well sketched’ (161–2).

Espinel, Vicente (1550–1624) Poet, subject of a short section of Spanish Lives. In a culture in which ‘Thought was forbidden’ by the state and the Inquisition and long poems were tediously unoriginal, he excelled among writers of ‘songs, madrigals, redondillas, and romances, which are often fresh and sparkling—warm from the heart, either dancing with animal spirits or soft with pathetic tenderness’ (LL 2.209).

Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, by Percy Bysshe Shelley MWS’s edition of PBS’s prose. Long meditated, it was completed in summer 1839 and published in two volumes by Edward Moxon in November 1839 (dated 1840). The preface introduces the works, presents PBS as a sensitive, politically engaged but essentially moderate man and a great artist, and asserts the faith that he ‘has passed into a sphere of being, better adapted to his inexpressible tenderness, his generous sympathies, and his richly gifted mind’ (NSW 2.343).

Este The ‘ancient and picturesque town’ (‘Petrarch’, LL 1.48) in the Euganean Hills where the Shelleys lived at I Capuccini, a villa ∗Byron was renting, in autumn 1818. ‘The Trial of Love’ is set in the convent and the nearby hills.

  Eton College 

51

Eton College Influential and long established school near ∗Windsor. PBS was at Eton, mostly unhappily, between 1804 and 1810. Horace in ‘The Mourner’ similarly experiences persecution there and later does not associate with his school-­fellows (CT 88) in this ‘distorted miniature of a bad world’ (89). Henry Fitzhenry in Lodore is a defiant pupil at Eton who leaves after a confrontation with the authorities when he defends the more PBS-like Derham (NSW 6.30–2); but he reminisces fondly to Ethel about the surrounding countryside, which she later visits with Villiers (NSW 6.108–9). Maurice in ‘Maurice or the Fisher’s Cot’ (LL 4.85), Matilda’s father (NSW 2.6–7) and Alfred Verney in The Last Man (NSW 4.179) are also at Eton. MWS sent Percy Florence Shelley to Eton’s traditional rival, ∗Harrow. His grandfather, Sir Timothy, advised against Eton because PBS’s having been there would make life difficult (see MWSL 2.135 n.1). ∗Byron, who was at Harrow, wrote and no doubt talked about his sentimental attachment to his old school, and it enjoyed the practical advantage of being closer to ∗London.

Eugene Aram, Review of see Bulwer, Edward Lytton ‘Euphrasia: A Tale of Greece’ Story published in The Keepsake for MDCCCXXXIX (November 1838), the Philadelphia annual Leaflets of Memory for 1847, and, as ‘The Brother: A Tale of Greece’, in the New York Keepsake for 1851. In each case, the author is ‘Mrs. Shelley’. While four friends are trapped overnight by a snow-drift as they travel in Sussex, one of them, Harry Valency, tells the story of how he spent another night during the Greek War of Independence; his account is reported in the fair copy manuscript by another of the group, and in the published version by someone who heard it later (CT 394, 296). Valency had opted to stay with Constantine, a young Greek ‘chief ’, and his followers, to fight a superior Turkish force. Both men are badly wounded. Already the youthful enthusiasm of the English volunteer has been contrasted with the deep, undisclosed sorrow of the Greek. Now Constantine, who knows he is dying, tells Valency (whose wounds he has managed to staunch) the origin of his grief. He and his sister Euphrasia were brought up by their wise and patriotic uncle, he as a warrior, she as a scholar, to play their part in the liberation of ∗Greece: she ‘improvised passionate songs of liberty’ and he ‘was fired by her poetry and eloquence’ (CT 302). While he was away fighting for the cause

52 E

the Turks, in Athens, seized Euphrasia and the Pasha’s son took her into his harem. With a small band of followers, Constantine attacked and set fire to the palace. He rescued his sister (and the other women of the harem) but a surviving Turk shot her. She died and he took her body to a convent before returning to his camp ‘to live and die for Greece’ (307). By morning, having told his story, Constantine is dead; Valency is taken to safety and gradually recovers. There is no return to the Sussex frame (see CT 394); it would perhaps seem anticlimactic. The name Euphrasia may have been suggested by that of the heroine of Arthur Murphy’s popular play The Grecian Daughter (1772); Fanny ∗Kemble played the part in 1830 and 1832. The inspiration for the general atmosphere and situation of ‘Euphrasia’ is ∗Byron’s Oriental Tales. Constantine’s attack on the harem recalls Conrad’s in The Corsair, and Euphrasia, ‘a dagger in her hand—majestic and fearless’ (CT 304) perhaps suggests the resolute Gulnare. (The ‘stern resolution’ of her features then fades to fit the scene in the Keepsake engraving, by J. Henry Robinson after Edward Corbould, of Constantine carrying his sister in his arms.) Constantine’s semi-delirious recollection of the fight at the palace, punctuated with frequent dashes (CT 304) is in the tradition of Byron’s The Giaour. Like Byron and ∗Mavrokordatos he goes to Western Greece; the prospect of Greek freedom makes him as excited as an ‘eagle chained when the iron links drop from him’ (CT 303) and it made Mavrokordatos ‘as gay as a caged eagle just free’ (MWSJ 359). Vargo (2012) finds in the tale ‘a deep ambivalence about violence’; Euphrasia ‘may be viewed … as an image of Greece enslaved. But Shelley’s focus seems to be self-enslavement as much as that imposed by the Turks; the story is an indictment of male irresponsibility and powerlessness in contrast to Euphrasia, whose name derives from the Greek word for happy and satisfied’ (p. 1221).

‘The Evil Eye’ Story by ‘the Author of Frankenstein’ in The Keepsake for MDCCCXXX (November 1829). Katusthius Ziani, from Corinth, is the sworn friend of Dmitri the Albanian, whose life he once saved. Dmitri, who searched for years for his stolen daughter, has become ‘ferocious and hard-hearted’ (CT 101) and people believe that he has the ‘evil eye’. Katusthius comes to claim his help in taking back half his patrimony from his brother, Cyril. Dmitri terrifies Cyril’s wife, Zella, by staring at their child, Constans, and later kidnaps him. Cyril conducts Zella to safety at her father’s house in Maina (Mani). Her father, Camaraz, insists on

  ‘The Evil Eye’ 

53

going with Cyril to continue the search for the boy, leaving Zella anxious by the ‘rugged shore’ (CT 108) in an extended description to accompany the Keepsake engraving by Charles Heath after Henry Corbould. Having tracked the kidnappers to Albania, Cyril and Camaraz learn that the brave young Constans has won Dmitri’s affection, making him wonder about his own missing child. But Katusthius wants to kill Constans and has made off with him, with Dmitri in pursuit. Eventually Dmitri manages to rescue the boy but then, when Camaraz catches up with him and reveals himself to be a Mainote pirate, prepares to kill him after all, since his (Dmitri’s) daughter was taken by Mainotes. In the show-down that follows, the wounded Camaraz reveals that Constans is not, in fact, the child of a Mainote, but of a girl he took from the island of Scio (Chios): Zella. Most of the characters are soon happily reconciled or reunited, but we hear nothing of what happens to Katusthius. Greek klephts or warriors, fierce friendship and vendettas, and Greek and Albanian place-names, were familiar to MWS and her readers from ∗Byron’s Oriental Tales and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto II (quoted at CT 100, 110). A more immediate inspiration, as Robinson points out in CT 379, is the similar, partly Byron-inspired world of ∗Mérimée’s La Guzla, her review of which came out earlier in 1829 (see ‘Illyrian Poems – Feudal Scenes’). The story may also draw on ∗Trelawny’s tales and memories of his adventures in Greece. (MWS saw Trelawny, for the first time since his return, in November 1828. Trelawny’s and his Greek wife’s daughter, Zella, was born in 1826.) The ‘evil eye’ is an older folk tradition; MWS may have come across it as the malocchio of ∗Naples. Roberts (1990), p. 95, cites the ‘mesmeric powers’ of the villain in PBS’s St Irvyne but La Guzla provides a more direct source (CT 379). Smith (1996) points out that MWS ‘tailored her story to the Keepsake’s women readers by placing its exotic elements in a framework of wifely and maternal devotion’ (p.  78). And the final ‘domestic reconciliation’ where Dmitri in effect civilizes himself ‘functions as a fantasy of imperialist ideology’ (p. 79).

F

‘Fair Italy! Still shines thy sun as bright’ Untitled manuscript poem in MWS’s hand, beginning with this line, dated 10 September 1833 and first published in 1997. The speaker is not seeking ‘that smiling day’ of earlier ‘love, hope & joy’ once experienced in ∗Italy, but its ‘fair fields enfold the sacred clay’ and she longs to rest by the ‘lowly bed’— evidently PBS’s tomb in Rome—until her soul seeks ‘a clime than thine more blest -/Bidding farewell to Earth and Italy!’ (LL 4.145).

Falkner. A Novel Falkner. A Novel, ‘By the Author of Frankenstein, The Last Man etc’ was published by Saunders and Otley in three volumes in early February 1837 and reprinted that year in New York by the same publishers. It was written between late 1835 and late 1836. Elizabeth Raby, an orphan in Cornwall, comes upon Falkner and prevents his intended suicide. He discovers that Elizabeth’s mother was the friend of Alithea Neville, for whose death he was responsible—the details emerge much later—and decides to adopt the child. They travel abroad and, although Falkner is still haunted by remorse, a deep bond develops between them. Having seen Alithea’s son, who is treated badly by his father, at Baden, he guiltily returns to England with Elizabeth. He intends to send her to her father’s (hitherto unsympathetic) wealthy relations and to seek an expiatory

© The Author(s) 2019 M. Garrett, The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Palgrave Literary Dictionaries, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56639-3_6

55

56 F

death in ‘desperate warfare in a distant country’ (NSW 7.49), but Elizabeth persuades him to take her with him to ∗Greece, where she will stay in the safety of the British-ruled Ionian Islands (Zante, now Zakynthos) while he goes to fight for Greek independence. Three years later, he nearly dies of fever and wounds but recovers through her devoted nursing. She has saved his life again and he decides not to ‘quarrel again with existence’ (NSW 7.63). As they sail from ∗Italy to ∗France Elizabeth again meets and is helped by Gerard Neville. Falkner is horrified to see him and insists that his name must not be mentioned, but Elizabeth meets him once more while staying with Lady Cecil, whom she met in Italy and who turns out to be Neville’s stepsister. Neville’s life has been dominated for years by his attempts to find his mother and to clear her name—he believes that she was abducted by a man, his father that she went voluntarily. Hearing of Neville’s quest, Falkner decides to tell him and Elizabeth the truth. Elizabeth reads the narrative of his early life. Rejected as Alithea’s suitor by her father, he spent ten years in ∗India. On inheriting money he returned to England, where he found that Alithea had married the jealous, sarcastic ‘human brute’ (NSW 7.176) Sir Boyvill Neville. Falkner tried to persuade her to go away with him. She refused but he carried her off; he repented and intended to take her back to her home but she was swept away and drowned. He buried her and intended to kill himself. Elizabeth reads the narrative with compassion for all concerned. Neville gives the account to his father, who locates Alithea’s remains and wants Falkner to be tried for murder and die a felon’s death. Neville, by contrast, becomes increasingly sure of Falkner’s essential innocence. Falkner is arrested. Elizabeth refuses to dissociate herself from him. His case looks desperate when a crucial witness, Osborne, cannot be produced from ∗America; Neville, by now very much at odds with his father, volunteers to go to America and trace Osborne but learns that he is now in England. Osborne gives the vital evidence, the dying Sir Boyvill is reconciled to his son and acknowledges Falkner’s innocence, Neville speaks in his favour at the trial and he is acquitted. Falkner expects to lose Elizabeth, and Neville and Elizabeth each other, but a solution is worked out, with much generosity on all parts, by which the lovers marry and Falkner continues to live with them.

Contexts and Sources Within MWS’s work Falkner is closest to Lodore, sharing its intensive focus on familial relationships, contemporary setting and predominantly upper-class characters—a ∗‘Silver-fork’ element. MWS says it is ‘in the style of Lodore,

  Falkner. A Novel 

57

but the story more interesting & even, I should think, more popular’ (MWSL 2.263). For some connections see Hill-Miller (1995), pp.  199–200; Sites (2005b) notes that while Lord Lodore conducts himself according to ‘the opinions of the world’, Neville, ‘in forgiving Falkner, breaks the code of honour at the heart of so many tragedies’ (p. 170). The situation of real or adoptive father and daughter living in an intense, incestuous or quasi-incestuous isolation echoes Mathilda but ends with the family regenerated rather than destroyed. (See further Turner [2017], pp. 171–7.) The discussion of crime, its causes and arguably mitigating circumstances, recalls Frankenstein. In both novels an extended inner narrative provides such explanation or justification; Falkner’s written account will ‘reveal the secrets of my heart and dwell on the circumstances that led to the fatal catastrophe I record, so that, though a criminal, I do not appear quite a monster’ (NSW 7.154). His apologia, like the creature’s, must be judged both by another character or characters and by the reader. ∗Godwin’s novels often share this emphasis on judgement or interpretation. There are other, more specific links. Pamela Clemit in NSW 7.ix–x notes that the name ‘Falkner’ may recall Godwin’s play Faulkener (1807), ‘in which the central character emphasizes the importance of filial duty’. ‘Falkner’ also suggests Falkland, another man who long conceals a crime, in Godwin’s Caleb Williams; ‘Falkner’s acquittal and acceptance works out Godwin’s concept of personal reconstruction rather than the legal vengeance [on Falkland]… at the end of Caleb’ (Bennett [1998], p.  102; see further Sites [2005b], pp. 166–9). Falkner can also be seen as influenced by, but inverting, the relationship between father and daughter in Godwin’s Deloraine (1833): there Catherine as the perfect, faithful daughter, has much in common with Elizabeth but, as Hill-Miller (1995) points out, Elizabeth is at the centre of the closing triangular relationship and exercises power over her father whereas Deloraine is at the centre of his triangle (pp.  196–7; see also Chatterjee [2007], pp. 37–9). Allen (2008) looks at Falkner in the context of ‘criminality and the question of the ethical nature of those publicly labelled as criminals’ in Deloraine, ∗Bulwer’s Eugene Aram (1832) and the true story, drawn on by both Godwin and Bulwer, of the murderer Eugene Aram (1704–1759) (p.  170). The Aram material enables further exploration by MWS of ‘her perennial concern with how the past dominates the present’ and how this cycle can be broken (p. 171). Finally Turner (2017) argues that Elizabeth, in insisting that she ‘will not reason’ and cannot be separated from Falkner ‘but must follow the natural, the irresistible bent of my character’ (NSW 7.278), challenges ‘Falkner’s Godwinian ideas about the family’ (p. 177). Sites (2005b) argues persuasively that MWS aims ‘to present a fully realized Wollstonecraftian

58 F

heroine in the education and life of Elizabeth …, a “womanly” yet independent-­ minded and idealistic heroine’ (pp. 150–1). The name Elizabeth Raby, and her Catholic upper-class family, recalls ∗Byron’s Aurora Raby, ‘the beautiful but aloof young Catholic’ in Don Juan, Canto XV (NSW 7.x). Byron’s participation and death in the Greek War of Independence informs Falkner’s near-death in Greece; haunted by remorse for a crime whose details long remain obscure, he has a general resemblance with Byronic heroes. Sites (2005b) sees him as transforming ‘from a destructive Byronic hero to a more enlightened [P.B.] Shelleyan one’ (p. 153). Hamlet is an important sub-text in its exploration of parent-child relationships, betrayal and guilt, and explicitly in Neville’s identification with the prince’s task of vindicating a parent (NSW 7. 86–7); for Elizabeth ‘It was nothing strange that Neville, essentially a dreamer and a poet’, should identify with Hamlet (NSW 7.89). The death of Godwin in April 1836 no doubt influenced MWS’s thinking about fathers, parent-child relationships and loss in Falkner. Poovey (1984) sees indirectly expressed resentment of the father as an element informing Elizabeth’s ‘punishment’ of Falkner at the end of the novel (pp. 163, 169). A simpler biographical element is the similarity between the prejudiced Sir Oswi Raby and Sir Timothy ∗Shelley. Sir Oswi’s son, like PBS, rebelled against his religion and made an unsuitable marriage; ‘his death was a relief ’ to the father, and Sir Oswi, like Sir Timothy, is unwilling to give substantial aid to the widow who, like MWS, ‘was the partner of his rebellion’ (NSW 7.141).

Themes In November 1835 MWS told ∗Gisborne that she was going to write a novel displaying her opinion of ‘fidelity as the first of human virtues’ (MWSL 2.260). After the epigraph—the altar and temple of Fidelity from PBS’s Rosalind and Helen: A Modern Eclogue (1819), lines 1051–1055—the word occurs seventeen times in the novel. At the beginning Elizabeth faithfully visits her mother’s grave and she remains faithful, most obviously in her refusal to abandon Falkner—his very weakness ‘riveted the chain of gratitude and fidelity by which she was bound’ (7.196). Falkner maintains his loyalty to Alithea, to remorse, and to Elizabeth—‘fidelity is our [Elizabeth’s and Falkner’s] ­characteristic’ (NSW 7.278)—and Neville his to his mother’s memory and to Elizabeth. ‘Elizabeth could not break faith with Falkner—Neville could not renounce her’ and so ‘they three must remain together through life, despite all of tragic and miserable that seemed to separate them’ (7.299). Such obsessive

  Falkner. A Novel 

59

fidelity is not, however, an unambiguous good. Falkner’s complete commitment to the idea of loving Alithea leads to her death and to his unhappiness; his ‘vehemence’ of disposition begins in boyhood and informs his ‘secret and ardent passion’ first for love and then for remorse (7.33, 31). He is ruled by extremes, whether the desire to kill himself, the belief that women are ‘beings of a better species’ (7.175)—‘a mere inversion,’ Sites (2005b) observes, of the attitude of his rival Sir Boyvill (p. 162)—or the expectation that Elizabeth will desert him. He is both tormented and redeemed by his remorse. Allen (2008) presents the case that Elizabeth’s ‘form of fidelity’ is to be distinguished from the ‘metaphysical quest for the truth embodied in Falkner and Neville’, their ‘unrealistic, unrealizable totalization of ethical values’. Her fidelity ‘signifies an understanding of truth and justice achieved on a human level’ (p. 178). Fatherhood is another important theme. Most father figures in the novel fail completely in their role, including Falkner’s father (NSW 7.157–8) and uncle (158–9), the intemperate, proud and vindictive Sir Boyvill (redeemed only at the end of his life), Alithea’s rough and unsympathetic father and Elizabeth’s narrow-minded grandfather, Sir Oswi Raby. Like Falkner, they are driven by extremes. Mothers, and women more generally, fare better, for example Alithea’s wise, benign mother and Sir Oswi’s daughter-in-law, Mrs Raby, who eventually conquers her prejudices to reach out to Elizabeth and Falkner. Falkner is more successful as a father figure than most other men in the novel, but even his relationship with Elizabeth is, as Joffe (2007a) says, ‘unnaturally intensified by the absence of an appropriate maternal figure’ (p. 133). At times the relationship seems close to incest—‘I am his, bought by his kindness’, says Elizabeth of her ‘more than father’ (7.233, 238), while he grows ‘to worship the very thought of her’, finds her ‘in no way inferior’ to Alithea, and confuses the two women in a dream (7.249, 280). For Joffe (2007b) her dependency on Falkner continues to the end: ‘She is not an independent agent, has no sense of self, and can exist only within the perimeter’ of the final ‘bizarre triangle’ (p. 90). Gerard has a similar difficulty until, ‘In reconciling with his father … and becoming aware of the circumstances of his mother’s death [he] resolves his Oedipus complex’ (Joffe [2007b], pp. 88–9). The central relationship between Falkner and Elizabeth is seen more positively by Saunders (2000): ‘Shelley constructs the family on a new footing. She adopts the premise that relationships should be based on more substantial values than a blind adherence to the creed that blood is thicker than water’, picking up ‘a central theme of the social reform agenda of her parents’ generation’ (p.  215). Elizabeth, for all her ‘lively sense of duty’ (7. 55) is not as dependent on others as Carlson (2007a, b) suggests. From childhood onwards, she determinedly sets herself against her adoptive father’s depression and

60 F

death-wish. She declines simply to do what she is told, most forcefully in her insistence on going to Falkner in his prison, refusing to live by such ‘fictitious notions of propriety and false delicacy’ as Lady Cecil and Mrs Raby would have her (NSW 7.234). Gerard Neville’s willingness to live in harmony with the man responsible for his mother’s death shows the same freedom from convention. Neville exemplifies traditionally female sensitivity, just as Elizabeth shows traditionally male strength. Elizabeth, Neville and Falkner establish a family group which appears to function better than the more conventional, unhappy marriages, ends the potentially unhappy or incestuous isolation of the father and daughter and satisfies the apparently mutually exclusive demands of father and lover. As Carlson (2007) argues, ‘Lodore and Falkner attempt to alter marital despotism from the inside’, ‘admitting and then redirecting the intensity between fathers and daughters to a third party’ (pp. 121, 300 n. 42).

Reception MWS told Leigh ∗Hunt in April 1837 that Falkner ‘is a favourite of mine’ but felt in retrospect that it ‘wanted … a sort of softening in the tone, & something to diversify the continual pressure on one topic’ (MWSL 2.285–6). The Literary Gazette and Journal of the Belles Lettres for 4 February 1837 reached a rather similar conclusion: ‘Energy and highly wrought passion are her most characteristic features … The relief of playfulness does not suit her pictures’. ‘Variation’ is often provided, instead, by ‘passages of tenderness and pathos’ and ‘thus, though [the novel is] forcible in detail and general effect, the prevailing colours are sombre and gloomy’ (p. 66). The Monthly Review for March 1837 also finds ‘gloominess’ but feels that it arises naturally from the story and ‘is never unwelcome, but of a soft and melancholy cast’. If there are similarities with Godwin’s work, there is no imitation and none of his ‘scepticism as to the existence of human virtue and disinterested goodness’ (p. 376). (And if MWS has ‘imbibed much of her husband’s poetic temperament’, she has ‘shorn it of those extravagant visions and emotions which led him beyond the province of truth’ [p. 376].) But The Spectator (4 February 1837, p. 111) and The Satirist (26 February 1837, p. 482) thought the novel a pale imitation of Godwin. Reviewers often praise Elizabeth for her angelic qualities: in The Monthly Review, she is ‘one of the loveliest and most winning creatures’ (p. 377). More unusually, the Monthly also finds ‘an absorbing interest in behalf of Falkner’ which is established by ‘an acute and delicate dissection of motives and

  ‘The False Rhyme’ 

61

t­ emptations, and an unmitigating picture of the consequences of crime … as also the penitent’s desire to atone for his great offences’ (pp. 376–7; compare The Metropolitan Magazine for 18 March 1837, p. 67). The Examiner for 12 February 1837 dissented: the novel inspires ‘disgust’, seeking ‘a spurious sympathy’ for ‘a criminal, because, forsooth, in other respects he was a well-­ disposed man’ (p. 101). The Literary Gazette felt that the main characters and events ‘belong rather to the regions of romance than to the representation of actual life which we understand by the term, “Novel”’ (p. 66). The Monthly Repository complains about some implausibility of plot towards the end and detects some ‘trite conventionalisms, in the shape of moral reflections’ (p. 230). But on the whole, reviews were fairly positive: if for The Monthly Repository, ‘Aristocratic sympathies and shallow views peep out here and there, the tendency of the whole is lofty, and worthy of [MWS’s] noble descent and early associations’ (p. 230) and it is ‘without any comparison, the finest work which Mrs Shelley has produced since … “Frankenstein”’ (p.  228). The Observer for 5 February 1837 admires the variety, interesting situations and pathos of Falkner (p. 3), The Age for 2 April its ‘intellect and feeling’ (p. 106). Further reading: Jowell (1997); Rajan (2014).

‘The False Rhyme’ Story by ‘the Author of “Frankenstein”’ published in November 1829 in The Keepsake for MDCCCXXX. It appeared also, on 11 November 1829, anonymously, in The Athenaeum and was reprinted in The Casket, Flowers of Literature, Wit & Sentiment for May 1830, The Polar Star of Entertainment and General Science (1830) and The American Keepsake for 1835. (The last three credit, again, ‘The Author of “Frankenstein”’.) Margaret, Queen of Navarre, finds that her brother, King Francis I of France, ‘after,’ it is said, ‘some lover’s quarrel’, has inscribed on the window of his apartment the couplet ‘Souvent femme varie/Bien fou qui s’y fie’ (Women are inconstant/Whoever trusts them is quite mad). Margaret suggests how the verses would ‘run better’, substituting ‘homme’ for ‘femme’ and the feminine ‘folle’ for ‘fou’. They argue about whether men or women are more often unfaithful. Francis cites the case of Emilie de Lagny, one of Margaret’s maids of honour, who seems to have run away with her page while her husband, accused of ‘traitorously yielding … a fortress under his command’, languishes in prison. Eventually Margaret wins the bet that she can prove even Emilie guiltless when it is revealed that in fact she had taken her husband’s place in the dungeon so that he could go out and vindicate his honour—he was

62 F

wrongly accused and distinguishes himself in battle. The King, losing the bet, smashes the window with the offending couplet. ‘The False Rhyme’ enlarges on the scene in Richard Parkes Bonington’s picture of Francis and Margaret as engraved by Charles Heath for The Keepsake (reproduced in CT 118) from a lost original displayed in the Paris Salon of 1827. (Bonington’s earlier version of the scene is now in the Wallace Collection in London; see Mitchell [2014].) The story of the inscription is first recorded in Pierre de Brantôme’s (c.1540–1614) Recueil des dames, published in 1665; the legend became well known and appears most famously, soon after ‘The False Rhyme’, in Victor Hugo’s Le Roi s’amuse (1832). MWS will have been aware of the status of the historical Queen Marguerite, unusual for a sixteenth-­ century woman, as humanist and author. There is perhaps an implied contrast between her achievements and her brother’s fame as a womanizer whose main reputed composition was the shallow ‘Souvent femme varie …’. Emilie’s revelation of her sex and ‘a quantity of rich golden hair’ derives, as Markley (2000), p. 120, notes, from ∗Ariosto’s Bradamante (Orlando Furioso XXXII.lxxiv) and ∗Spenser’s Britomart (The Faerie Queene, IV.i.xiii and IV. vi.xx). ‘Unlike Britomart Emilie conquers through self-chosen inaction and suffering’ but, Markley feels, this does not undermine ‘Shelley’s joke at the expense of patriarchy as embodied in Francis I’ (p. 121). Markley (1997) suggests that she jokes also about the ideal of loyalty—treated seriously in The Last Man and Perkin Warbeck—exaggerating it ‘to comic proportions’ (p. 108).

Fantasmagoriana French translation, by J.-B. B. Eyriès (1812), of the first two volumes of Der Gespensterbuch, edited by F. Schulze and J. Apel. It includes the ghost-stories read by the group at ∗Villa Diodati before ∗Byron suggested they should write their own (NSW 1.176–7).

Feminism MWS was strongly aware of ∗Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Christy Baxter, Isabella Baxter ∗Booth’s sister, remembered the teenaged MWS and CC arguing the feminist cause in 1812 or 1813 in a discussion ‘on the subject of woman’s vocation, as to whether it should be purely domestic, or whether they should engage in outside interests’ (Marshall [1889], vol. 1, p. 33). Feeling alone and excluded in London in December

 Feminism 

63

1824 she reflects on how she is a victim of her sex, of the ‘masculine insensibility’ with which men ‘are willing to wound the wounded & disdain one fallen on evil days—Most women I believe wish that they had been men—so do not I—change my sex & I do not think that my talents would be greater—& I should be like one of these—selfish unkind … [D]id not the memory of those matchless lost ones redeem their race I should learn to hate a sex who are strong only to oppress—moral only to insult’ (MWSJ 487–8). From the mid and late twentieth century, her life and work were increasingly interpreted as key sites of feminist inquiry. (An early sign of the uses to which feminist discourse could put the novel is provided by Caird [1892] who, defending the New Woman from an exaggerated attack, says that for her opponent ‘there is no medium between Griselda and a sublimated Frankenstein’s monster, which we have all so often heard of and seldom seen’ [p. 812].) Frankenstein in particular shows the ill consequences of male ambition, a point reinforced by the absence or silencing of strong female characters with the exception of Safie (and Margaret Saville if we think of her as recipient and editor of the narratives). Women evidently contrast with, or are victims of, male aggression, ego, or ambition in other work including Valperga, Mathilda, and The Last Man. It was mainly with reference to Frankenstein, however, that feminist analysis of the work was inaugurated by scholars including Moers (1977) and Gilbert and Gubar (1979). One of the main areas for debate about MWS’s feminism has been whether it becomes lukewarm in her later life and work. For Poovey (1984) she was able, in her last three novels, ‘Through thinly disguised autobiographical characterizations of herself as a docile, domestic heroine … both to court the approval of a middle-class, largely female audience and to achieve the personal satisfaction of expressing a self that was “original” only in its exemplary propriety’ (pp. 116–17). On occasion, she expressed views that are less than feminist—or at least, not in accordance with modern feminism. In a confessedly ‘querulous & sad’ letter of 1835 she said that women are ‘quite different creatures’ from men, ‘better though weaker but wanting in the higher grades of intellect’ (MWSL 2.246). According to Charles ∗Sumner she told him, in 1838, that ‘the greatest happiness for any woman was to be the wife or mother of a distinguished man’ (MWSL 2.305–6 n.2). And in ‘Rousseau’ she says that ‘The true distinctive virtue of woman’s nature is her promptitude to self-­ sacrifice, and a capacity to bind up her existence in the happiness and well-­ being of the objects of her attachment’ (LL 3.330). MWS provides an important clarification of her position, however, in her extended ‘self-examination’ of 1838 (MWSJ 553–9). In the reformist cause, including ‘the Rights of Women’, she is ‘not a person of Opinions’ (553). She

64 F

feels a reluctance to endorse extreme views and ‘on some topics (especially with regard to my own sex) I am far from making up my mind’ (554). She does not want to join a party or propagate opinions; ‘If I have never written to vindicate the Rights of women, I have ever befriended women when oppressed—at every risk I have defended & supported victims to the social system’ (557). In life she provided practical aid and support to women including Dods (see Robinson family), Isabel ∗Robinson, ∗Williams, Isabel Baxter ∗Booth, Gee ∗Paul and ∗Norton. In literature she continued to explore the position of women in a male-dominated society with a more nuanced regard to the possible roles available to them and a strong awareness of individual difference—of a society, for instance, which has a more obvious place for Ethel Villiers than for Fanny Derham (see Lodore). Further reading: Mellor (1988); Corbett (1993).

Fénelon, François de Salignac de la Mothe(1651–1715) Catholic churchman, writer on education and theologian. MWS first read his Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699) in childhood (NSW 8.382) and again in 1816 and 1822 (MWSJ 97, 406). In ‘Fénélon’ (she spells his name with an added second accent) MWS celebrates the ‘benevolence, generosity, and sublime elevation above all petty and self-interested views’ (LL 3.228) which sustained him through religious controversies and persecution. Her sources include essays by D’Alembert and ∗Voltaire where Fénelon is similarly exemplary as a Catholic priest with exceptional qualities of tolerance, hard work and willingness to criticize abuses of power (LL 3.xviii). Her immediate inspiration for including Fénelon’s life, however, is most likely ∗Godwin’s controversial claim in Political Justice that the life of the author of a book as beneficial to mankind as Télémaque deserved to be saved before that of a chambermaid (LL 3.xviii). MWS clarifies Godwin’s claim by foregrounding the book’s ‘value as a manual for a ruler, to whom it teaches the primary duty of making his people happy’ (LL 3.206 note a). See further Carlson (2007), pp. 206–7.

Fenwick, Eliza (1766?–1840) Novelist and children’s writer. She was a friend of ∗Wollstonecraft, was with her when she died, and looked after the baby MWS for ten days. In ‘Life of William Godwin’ (LL 4.111) she is ‘Mrs. Fenwick the ever kind cordial-­

  ‘Ferdinando Eboli: a Tale’ 

65

hearted, womanly friend’ (in this instance particularly of Maria Reveley, later ∗Gisborne). She managed the Godwins’ Juvenile Library at 41 Skinner Street in late 1807 and early 1808. She lived in Barbados, and then America, after 1814.

‘Ferdinando Eboli: a Tale’ Story by ‘the Author of Frankenstein’ published in November 1828 in The Keepsake for MDCCCXXIX. It was reprinted, with the same ascription, in the Boston Friendship’s Offering for 1845 and the New York Keepsake for 1854. During the reign of ∗Napoleon’s brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, as King Gioacchino of ∗Naples (1808–1815), Count Ferdinando Eboli, who is about to marry Adalinda, daughter of his old friend Marchese Spina, is ambushed, stripped of his clothes and rings and imprisoned by persons unknown. When he is released, he finds that someone who looks very like him has supplanted him at court. The false Count succeeds in persuading the King and Spina that Ferdinando is the impostor. Ferdinando is charged with theft, having taken a miniature of his father from his own family palace, and is condemned to hard labour; he refuses when his enemy asks him to sign a confession of his falsehood as the price of his freedom. Adalinda becomes suspicious of the impostor when, in preparation for marrying her, he places her effectively under house arrest. Under pressure, he admits that he is Ludovico, illegitimate elder brother of Ferdinando, and has been brought up by his mother to hate his father and brother. He intends to force Adalinda to marry him. She escapes (in the male disguise shown in the engraving by Charles Heath after Alfred E. Chalon in the 1829 Keepsake) and fortunately meets Ferdinando—he too has escaped with the aid of a fellow-prisoner, a bandit. The false Count is captured and the true Count returns to Naples, is acknowledged and marries Adalinda. They treat Ludovico generously. He serves in Murat’s army; the brothers are together in the retreat from Moscow and Ludovico dies in Ferdinando’s arms. Markley (2000) comments that ‘This mysterious twist on the Doppelgänger tale owes something to … [PBS’s] Zastrozzi, with its figure of the vengeful, illegitimate half-brother who is determined to destroy the life of his more fortunate sibling’ (p. 118). Eboli is familiar possibly from ∗Schiller’s character Princess Eboli in Don Carlos (1787) and from the Italian place-name (in a story which, like MWS’s ‘The Sisters of Albano’ in the same volume of The Keepsake, features some Italian landscape and local colour). The presence of Murat and the mention of the retreat from Moscow either hint at liberal sympathies or, more likely, exploit readers’ nostalgia for what was becoming a past age—‘During this quiet time of peace, we are fast forgetting the excitements

66 F

and astonishing events of the last war … Those were more romantic days than these’ (CT 65).

Ferrara Italian city, part of the Papal States until 1860. The Shelleys and CC saw ∗Ariosto and ∗Tasso sites, manuscripts and memorabilia here in November 1818. The city features as a setting in Valperga (NSW 3.126–56).

Field Place Shelley family home, near Horsham in Sussex. MWS first visited in early June 1844 after her son, Sir Percy Florence ∗Shelley, had inherited it from Sir Timothy ∗Shelley; she found it ‘dully placed’ and ‘a dull house in every way’ (MWSL 3.135). The house needed extensive repairs—it remained terribly damp (MWSL 3.346, 372) and for a time it was let to a tenant. MWS moved in, with her son and daughter-in-law, at about the beginning of August 1848; she lived there until October that year and again for much of January-­ September 1849 and June-autumn 1850.

Fielding, Henry (1707–1754) Novelist. MWS notes her reading of Amelia (1752) in 1817 and The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews (1742) in 1818 (MWSJ 180, 235). She refers to The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749) only in 1829 (MWSJ 510), but had no doubt been long familiar with it, as is suggested by her easy references to his novels generally and to the broadness of language ‘pardoned in the days of Fielding’ (MWSL 1.308, 2.120).

The Fields of Fancy see Mathilda Filicaja, Vincenzo da (1642–1707) Poet. ‘Filicaja’ in Italian Lives stresses the piety and uprightness of his life and work. Rejecting the stultifying rules, he ‘revivified his poetic diction by

 Florence 

67

transfusing into it many elevated and energetic modes of speech, hitherto reserved for prose only’; ‘the grandeur of his ideas gives force to the originality of his expressions’ (LL 1.207). Tilar Mazzeo suggests that the life does not mention the poet’s famous sonnet ‘Italia, Italia’ because of what The Retrospective Review, in 1824, calls its ‘fatal axiom, “Italy is destined to perpetual servitude”’ (LL 1.liv).

Florence The Shelleys lived here at Palazzo Marini, Via Valfonda, between early October 1819 and late January 1820. MWS came again at the end of October 1842 and stayed, with Percy Florence ∗Shelley and ∗Knox, until March 1843. Florence, dominated by the Guelphs, is the main enemy of Castruccio in Valperga. (The city of the time is described in NSW 3.165–6.) Its medieval and Renaissance politics feature extensively in Italian Lives, especially ‘Machiavelli’.

Foggi, Elise see Duvillard, Elise, or Louise The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, A Romance see Perkin Warbeck Foscolo, Ugo (1778–1827) Italian novelist, poet and critic who grew up on the Venetian-ruled island of Zante (Zakynthos) and lived in England from 1816. ∗Murray consulted Foscolo when considering whether to publish Valperga; he reported, in August 1822, having read the first volume, that he found the story ‘sometimes heavy and often tamely told … yet entertaining as far as I read it’. He noted a discrepancy between the portrayal of historical figures and the way ‘they think and express themselves as our contemporaries’ and felt that the author saw too much through the eyes of ∗Sismondi and other modern historians (Foscolo [1933–1994], volume 22, pp. 81–2). Castruccio in the novel he sees as ‘a Volterian’ [sic] (p. 81). ‘Ritratto di Ugo Foscolo’, a translation of his ‘Sonetto autoritratto’, signed ‘M.S.’ in The Bijou for 1830, is possibly by MWS (see NSW 1.238). ‘Ugo Foscolo’ in Italian Lives praises his love of liberty and passionate opposition to ∗Napoleon. Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1802) is too imitative of ∗Goethe’s Werther but more responsive to nature than most Italian literature and, also

68 F

unusually, unites in its language ‘the familiar and colloquial with the tasteful and the expressive’ (LL 1.339–41). (LL 1.lvi notes that the Werther ­comparison ‘repeats a generally held perception of the work’.) Nearer perfection are his Essays on Petrarch (published in English, 1823) and Ode on Sepulchres (Dei Sepolcri, 1807), which is perhaps unequalled ‘for harmony, grace, sweetness, and pure taste’ (LL 1.361). Further reading: Guerra (2005).

France MWS travelled or lived in France in summer 1814, May and late summer 1816, March 1818, July-August 1823, late spring 1828, June 1840, October 1840-January 1841, August 1843, December 1843–January 1844, September 1849-April 1850 and early summer 1850. She writes about the country in HSWT, Rambles and French Lives, often somewhat unfavourably: ‘the peculiar habits and manners of the French’ are less congenial than those of the Italians and ‘in France, there is a discomfort and a desolation apparent in the midst of its civilisation and plenty, which is singularly disagreeable’ (‘Alfieri’, LL 1.267); the manners of ‘the French common people’ have declined since 1830 and the French ‘require the restraint of good manners’ because of their sensitive amourpropre and quick tempers (NSW 8.149). She engaged closely with French literature and history, however, discussing them extensively in French Lives; although much French literature suffers from defects of ‘circumlocution’ and ‘parade’ (NSW 2.172), she responds enthusiastically to writers including ∗Molière and ∗Voltaire. She knew ∗Mérimée and met Benjamin Constant, General Lafayette, Sainte-Beuve and possibly ∗Lamartine, and felt that France gave its authors more encouragement than England (see LL 3.463). She took an interest in French politics; for her view of the revolutions of 1830 (optimistic) and 1848 (‘wicked & desolating principles’) see MWSL 2.118, 123–4 and 3.335–6. French settings feature in parts of Valperga, The Last Man, Perkin Warbeck and Lodore, and in ‘The False Rhyme’ and ‘The Dream’. Frankenstein, ou le Prométhée moderne, translated by J.S. [Jules Saladin], was published in three volumes in Paris in July 1821. Other translations ­followed in 1922 and 1945 and steadily increased in number from the mid– 1960s, with French graphic, illustrated and children’s versions proliferating in the twenty-first century. (Saladin’s rendering, however, remained popular, with several editions since 2000 and an audiobook in 2013.) Adaptations for the stage range from an anonymous 1821 drama based on Saladin (unperformed: see Forry 121) and Le Monstre et le magicien (1826: see Frankenstein on Stage) to Philippe Faure’s Je ne suis pas Frankenstein (Lyon, Théâtre de la

 Frankenfoods 

69

Croix-Rousse, 1994). A television film by François Chevallier, Frankenstein: une histoire d’amour, was shown in 1974. Some translations of other MWS novels have appeared: Mathilda by Marie-Françoise Desmeuzes (1984), Le Dernier homme by Paul Couturiau (1988), Valperga by Nicole Berry (1997), Perkin Warbeck by Anne Rouhette-Berton (2014), whose Histoire d’un voyage de six semaines followed in 2015. For Frankensteinian themes in the work of Balzac, Flaubert and Zola see Baldick 63, 186–7, 195–6. See also: French Revolution; Napoleon Bonaparte.

Frankenfoods Term, coined in 1992, used especially by opponents of GM (genetically modified) food. Further reading: Hellsten (2006).

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus MWS’s first and best known novel. It combines elements of ∗Gothic horror and the Godwinian novel of ideas, paradoxically using ‘the fashionable medieval tale of the supernatural to tell a present-day or futuristic narrative grounded in real-life modern science’ (Shelley [1994a], p. 252). The creator who fails to foresee the consequences of creating, the suffering and the desire for revenge of the creature or monster, and the opposition or doubling of the two figures, have achieved a mythic status. Since the nineteenth century Frankenstein has directly or indirectly inspired many other novels as well as plays, films and graphic fiction, sequels and parodies: work often called, after the author’s description of her book in 1831, her ‘hideous progeny’ (NSW 1.180). Since the 1970s, the novel itself has provoked vigorous academic debate: it speaks to feminist, psychological, historicist, biographical, environmentalist and many other critical and scholarly traditions. Robert Walton, in a series of letters to his sister, Margaret Saville, describes his preparations and voyage in search of a passage to the North Pole and ‘the secret of the magnet’ (NSW 1.10) He and his crew see a gigantic figure driving his sledge across the ice and take on board a man, floating on a fragment of ice with his sledge, who has been pursuing the giant. The man, Victor Frankenstein, embarks on his narrative. He grows up near Geneva in a loving and benevolent family, including his cousin Elizabeth Lavenza. His interest in

70 F

old alchemical literature gives way, especially once he begins his studies at the university of ∗Ingolstadt, to intense pursuit of more modern scientific knowledge. Working alone (and failing to communicate with his family), he makes a creature from human body parts and succeeds in animating it. Frankenstein is horrified by the creature’s appearance, wakes to find him approaching him, flees and later returns to find him gone. Frankenstein falls ill and is nursed by his old friend Henry Clerval. After his recovery, he receives the news, in a letter from his father, that his young brother William has been murdered. When Frankenstein reaches the area where the murder took place, he sees the creature, revealed clearly for a moment by a lightning flash, and realizes that he must be the killer. The trusted family servant Justine Moritz is, however, wrongly accused of the murder and is executed in spite of Elizabeth’s pleas on her behalf. When creator and creature confront each other at the ∗Mer de Glace, the creature begins his narrative, explaining to Frankenstein his early cognitive development. Feared and attacked by the people who see him, he takes refuge in a ‘low hovel’ attached to a cottage. He acquires language, and learns about human manners and history, from secretly watching and listening to the family who live in the cottage, and from books he comes across abandoned in a ‘leathern portmanteau’ in the wood nearby. (His learning is helped forward when Felix, in the cottage, is teaching French to his beloved Safie.) He reads an account of his origins having discovered Frankenstein’s papers in ‘the pocket of the dress which I had taken from your laboratory’ (NSW 1. 97). Eventually he has the courage to talk to the old, blind De Lacey (MWS’s preferred spelling, rather than ‘De Lacy’: see NSW 1.91 n.a), telling him of his longing for friendship and how this is prevented by prejudice against him. De Lacey is sympathetic but when his family return to the cottage, they are horrified by the creature’s appearance and chase him away. He makes his way to Geneva. On the way, his anger is increased when he saves a girl who falls into a stream but is shot and wounded by her companion. He kills William because of his horrified reaction to his appearance and his mention of his father, M. Frankenstein—‘you belong then to my enemy’ (NSW 1.106). He plants the locket worn by William in a fold of the sleeping Justine’s dress, dooming her as ‘one of those whose smiles are bestowed on all but me’ (NSW 1.107). Frankenstein agrees, reluctantly, to the creature’s demand that he should construct a female creature to end his isolation: ‘one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me’ (NSW 1.107). In pursuit of this aim Frankenstein travels, with Clerval, to England and ∗Scotland. He goes on, alone, to work on the female creature in Orkney but, fearing the consequences and seeing the original creature, who has followed him in his travels, watching

  Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 

71

him with a ‘ghastly grin’, he destroys his unfinished new creation. The creature leaves, swearing revenge and that he will be ‘with you on your wedding-­ night’ (NSW 1. 130). Frankenstein drifts in his skiff until he lands in ∗Ireland, where he finds that the creature has strangled Clerval; Frankenstein is accused of the murder but, after two months of prison and illness, is acquitted and travels home with his father. Frankenstein now, as long intended, marries Elizabeth. He expects the creature to attempt to kill him that night, but instead he fulfils his threat by strangling Elizabeth. Frankenstein’s father dies of shock and grief a few days later. Having vowed revenge on the creature, Frankenstein follows him from ∗Switzerland to the Arctic until, cut off from further pursuit, he comes upon Walton’s ship. His narrative ends with a request to Walton to kill the creature if he cannot himself. Walton’s letters tell the rest of the story. The ship is trapped in the ice and his crew demand that, if it is freed, they should turn back rather than continuing northward. Frankenstein encourages them boldly to go on but a decision is taken to turn back just before he, exhausted, dies. The creature boards the ship, mourns over the body of his creator, and expresses to Walton both agonized remorse and the justification of one excluded from happiness and society. He will go on to ‘the most northern extremity of the globe … collect my funeral pile, and consume to ashes this miserable frame’ (NSW 1.169).

Sources As befits a work which went on to acquire archetypal significance, Frankenstein draws on multiple sources. The creation of the creature has, in addition to the references to ∗Galvani and ∗Darwin, sources or analogues in ∗Prometheus’ making of man as told by Ovid in Metamorphoses (see Pollin [1965], p. 102) or by ∗Godwin (‘Edward Baldwin’) in The Pantheon: or Ancient History of the Gods of Greece and Rome (1806). Pollin (1965) draws attention also to the animated statue in Condillac’s Traité des sensations (p. 105); see also Nogaret, François-Félix. For the possible influence of John Kirkby’s Automathes (1745)—the ‘extraordinary case’ of a ‘young nobleman … left in his infancy, upon a desolate island’—see NSW xcix and 96 n. A fundamental source for the creature’s early development is John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding: the novel shares its assumptions ‘concerning the absence of innate principles, the derivation of all ideas from sensation or reflection, and the efficacy of pleasure and pain in causing us to seek or avoid the various objects of sensation’ (Pollin [1965], p. 107). ∗Rousseau’s passage, in Emile, on how someone born fully grown would perceive the world, is another probable

72 F

influence (but see Richardson [1994] for the contrast between Rousseau’s helpless ‘imbecile’ of a man and the creature’s more immediate development [pp. 306 n.87, 206]). MWS may also have been aware of such accounts of ‘wild’ children living in isolation from human society as Jean-Marc Itard’s De l’éducation d’un homme sauvage (1801) and Rapport … sur … l’état actuel du sauvage de l’Aveyron (1807); see Shelley (1994a), pp. xxxvii–ix, and for further examples of her possible childhood reading about wild men and orang-utans see Barbour (2008), pp. 40–3. Caliban in The Tempest has some clear similarities to the creature: he is ‘salvage and deformed’, is deeply responsive to nature and to music, learns language from humans and comes to ‘curse’ them (dramatis personae, III.ii.133–6, I.ii.365–6). His desire to have ‘peopled … /This isle with Calibans’ (I.ii.352–3) may remind one of Frankenstein’s fear that ‘a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth’ by the monster and his companion (NSW 1. 28). (In both cases, the progeny can be seen as threateningly racially other; on the monster, Caliban and the discourse of slavery see Lloyd Smith [2004].) Prospero acknowledges ‘this thing of darkness … mine’ (V.i.275–6) and Frankenstein considers the creature ‘nearly in the light of my own vampire’ (NSW 1.55). The creature is confronted by ∗Volney’s dual vision of humans at once virtuous and vicious (NSW 1.89). (Pollin [1965], p. 101, cites the influence of the awakening of another ‘naïve intellect’ to human injustice and inequality, Galatea in ∗Genlis’ ‘Pygmalion et Galatée’ [Nouveaux contes moraux et nouvelles historiques, 1802–1803].) He then undergoes ‘a kind of short course in the history of Western civilization, ranging from the politics of classical heroism [∗Plutarch’s Lives], to the theology of Christianity [∗Milton’s Paradise Lost], to the virtues of feeling and the domestic of eighteenth-century sensibility [∗Goethe’s Werther]’ (Vargo [2016], p. 34). Milton’s myth of ‘the dangerous consequences of knowledge’ (Shelley [2008], p. 31) continues particularly significant in the rest of the novel (see Milton, John). Each of these three texts, however, feeds the creature’s awareness of human potential for virtuous achievement but also his sense of exclusion from it by his own uncertain status and the frequent human failure to fulfil that potential. While learning from the De Laceys’ authors he retains the hope—already lost by the time he tells his story—that the likes of the De Laceys themselves will understand him. There are many sources in the work of both of MWS’s parents. ∗Godwin’s novels, especially Caleb Williams and St Leon, provide precedents in the form of unreliable narrators, narratives of pursuit and confrontation, and the opposition between personal ambition and the interests of family and society. (For Clemit [2003], the creature’s ‘measured eloquence reflects a Rousseauvian sensibility, tempered by Godwinian logic’ [p. 34].) ∗Wollstonecraft is a

  Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 

73

particular influence on the story of Safie, an ‘exemplar of a woman claiming her rights as a rational being’ (Zonana [1991], p.  174) in line with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. For Walton’s frame narrative MWS read George Anson’s A Voyage Round the World … (1748) (MWSJ 142 and n.3), E. Ysbrants Ides’ Three Years Travels from Moscow Over-land to China (1706) (MWSJ 143 and n.1) and ‘old voyages’, possibly John Pinkerton’s A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels … (1807–1814) (MWSJ 146 and n.2). She will also have read such works on Arctic exploration as John Barrow’s ‘Article XI’ in The Quarterly Review for October 1816 (published February 1817). Richard (2003) sees the Arctic frame as drawing on but contesting ‘the improbable romance of polar exploration [especially in Barrow’s work], an enterprise with the phantasmal incentive of a temperate polar sea beyond the Arctic ice’ (p. 296; compare NSW 1.10 n.4 and Craciun [2016], pp. 90–4). Other settings in the novel draw on the author’s experience of Switzerland, ∗Germany, ∗Oxford and Scotland. The Ancient Mariner and Christabel are important presences in the novel (see Coleridge, Samuel Taylor). Other sources are poems by PBS, especially ‘Mutability’ (NSW 1.73, 96) and Alastor—lines 23–9 influence Frankenstein’s ‘days and nights in vaults and charnel houses’ (NSW 1.35), the narrative structure is similarly layered, and the Poet’s ‘self-centred seclusion’ (PS 1.463) parallels Frankenstein’s. The novel draws also on works by ∗Byron including Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto Three and Manfred (see Byron, George Gordon, Lord); Gothic novels; ∗Southey’s ‘Cornelius Agrippa’ (see Shelley [1994a], pp. xxvii–ix); ∗Voltaire’s tales as ‘a model for the Felix-Safie episode’ (NSW 1.xciv; see Webster-Garrett [2000] for Safie’s relation to Zoraida in ∗Cervantes’ Don Quixote 1.39–41); ∗Goethe’s Faust and/or Marlowe’s Dr Faustus; Aristophanes’ myth, in Plato’s Symposium, defining love ‘in terms of the desire to reunite with one’s second self after primal and globular man … was cut in half as a punishment for presuming to … challenge the gods’ (Shelley [2008], pp. 31, 33, 37 n.24). Biographical sources are often posited. One popular scenario involves MWS as creature to PBS’s or Godwin’s manipulative creator; Small (1972) sees creator and creature as two sides of PBS. (For Shelleyan, meliorist Clerval and Walton as opposed to Byronic ‘embittered idealist’ Frankenstein see Franklin [2003], p.  48.) The loss of MWS’s mother soon after giving birth to her, and of her own first-born daughter in 1815, are often seen as contributing to either an interest in the idea of reanimation—for her dream of bringing the baby back to life see MWSJ 70—or the more complex sort of reaction posited by Moers (1976), whose Frankenstein incorporates ‘the motif of revulsion against newborn life, and the drama of guilt, dread, and

74 F

flight surrounding birth and its consequences’ (p.  93). Aldiss (1986) sees MWS’s ‘hurt and orphaned feelings’ as ‘embodied in the unloved creature’; ‘Her mother’s death … must have caused her to feel that she, like the monster, had been born from the dead’ (p. 43).

Names Victor Frankenstein and his friend Henry Clerval both have first names associated with PBS.  For instance Henry features in ‘Henry and Louisa’ and Queen Mab and PBS and his sister Elizabeth Shelley (1794–1831)—who perhaps provides a first name for Elizabeth Lavenza—wrote Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire (1810). The name ‘Frankenstein’ may derive from two characters in ∗Lewis’s Tales, Frankheim and Falkenstein (Peck [1927], vol. 1, p. 55 and Palacio 93–4 n.5) or from ∗Dippel’s Castle Frankenstein, or from Benjamin ∗Franklin and his experiments (Roberts [1990], pp. 99–100, 118 n.76, 101). (On the sub-title see also Prometheus.) ‘Frankenstein’ sounds clearly Teutonic—and so, traditionally, Gothic; as a Genevese family the Frankensteins might have been expected to have a French name. Perhaps at the time, and certainly later, there will also have been a hint of Germanic earnestness, melding in the twentieth century with the obsessive ‘mad scientist’ and especially, in the wake of the World Wars, the more cold, clinical and evil version of that stereotype. (Such associations derive partly, of course, from films of Frankenstein rather than the novel.) A more everyday, less Germanic name might have lessened the tendency (especially in horror contexts) to call the creature by the creator’s name. Film tradition makes Frankenstein himself more sinister, and again perhaps more Teutonic, by adding to his name ‘Dr’ or making him ‘Baron von Frankenstein’ (an echo, no doubt, of Count ∗Dracula). Dr is there as early as the sub-title of the burlesque Humgumption; or, Dr. Frankenstein and the Hobgoblin of Hoxton (1823), perhaps inspired by Dr Faustus. The son of a baron in the 1931 film, he first becomes one himself in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). That the creature should have no name aptly indicates his plight as a new-­ made being outside the normative expectations of human society—and as one neglected, not even named, by his maker. Instead, he is called by various terms which often reveal more about the speaker’s attitude than about his essential nature: Frankenstein calls him most often ‘monster’, ‘fiend’, ‘daemon’ or ‘wretch’ rather than ‘creature’. ‘The monster’, ‘Frankenstein’s monster’, or ‘the Frankenstein monster’ remain common in more popular versions

  Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 

75

of the story as against ‘the creature’ in discussion of the novel itself. And the lack of name is another factor which encourages people to call him, not his maker, ‘Frankenstein’. Justine is ‘a name associated with persecution for truth’s sake’, as in the martyrs St Justin Martyr and St Justina (NSW 1.45 n.a). Agatha means good and Felix happy. Safie may suggest the Greek ‘Sophia’, Wisdom, or ‘saphes’, clear, distinct, plain, or (Pollin [1965], p. 101) Sophie in Rousseau’s Emile. (See Hogle [2016] for links between Sophie, who is offered an education inferior to her male equivalent; Safie, who is a potential foreign threat; and the creature, who ‘feels consigned to the cultural position of females and foreigners’ [p. 47].) Perhaps the most likely origin, however, is the Arabian title-­ character in J.H. Reynolds’ Safie of 1814 (NSW 1.88 n.a., where Crook cites also ‘saphies’ as protective Koranic charms from Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, 1799).

Composition Two or more conversations at ∗Villa Diodati in June 1816 were the main immediate spur to composition. In one, after 10 June, probably on or before 15, and after or possibly just before (see MYR 9.lxxvii) the group at the villa had been reading ∗Fantasmagoriana, Byron proposed that each of them should write a ghost-story. Either soon before or soon after this suggestion, probably on 15 or 16 June, there was a discussion about ‘the nature of the principle of life’, including how ‘the component parts of a creature might be manufactured … and endued with vital warmth’ (NSW 1.179). MWS says that she was ‘a devout but nearly silent listener’ to Byron and PBS; ∗Polidori recorded that it was he and PBS who ‘had a conversation about principles,— whether man was to be thought merely an instrument’ (Polidori [1911], p. 123). (There may have been several conversations on the same subject with different participants.) According to MWS’ 1831 introduction she spent several days trying to think of a story which would ‘speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror’ in the reader (NSW 1.178) Eventually, she says, she saw, ‘with shut eyes, but acute mental vision’ the scene of the creature stirring and its creator’s horror (NSW 1.179–80). As a result she announced, probably on 16 or 17 June (see MYR 9.lxxviii), that she had ‘thought of a story’ (NSW 1.180) and wrote out the substance of her ‘waking dream’, beginning ‘It was on a dreary night of November’—a phrase retained in the later versions of the novel (MYR 9.97).

76 F

This early fragment became part of a lost draft of Frankenstein, an ‘ur-text’ composed between then and early August, or possibly autumn, 1816 (MYR 9.lxxx). Here Elizabeth was called Myrtella, Clerval was Carignan, and the Walton frame and Safie story were very probably not yet included (MYR 9.lx-­ lxii). Between August 1816 and April 1817 the work expanded into the ‘intermediate’ draft for a two-volume novel. (What Robinson calculates to be the surviving 87% is printed in MYR 9 and Shelley [2008].) The Walton material is likely to date from late October or November 1816, when MWS read relevant books about Russia and sea-voyages (MYR 9.lxxxii; NSW 1.xciii; MWSJ 141–6). Safie’s story—including such important material as the creature’s reading—was almost certainly first written in late November or early December 1816 (MYR 9.lix, lxxxiii). She was called at this stage Maimouna, a name derived from Maimuna in ∗Southey’s Thalaba, and then more briefly Amina (MYR 9.lix-lx). The draft contains corrections and additions by PBS. Robinson estimates that his total contribution to the novel—taking into account material added at draft, fair copy and proof stage—amounts to ‘at least 4–5,000’ out of about 72,000 words (Shelley [2008], p.  25). (MWS’ original, without the PBS material, is reconstructed in Shelley [2008], pp.  256–429.) Assessments of PBS’s role range from Robinson’s view that he acts as ‘an able midwife’ for MWS’s ‘creative genius’ (MYR 9.lxvii) to the extreme belief of Lauritsen (2007) that he is effectively ‘The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein’. Smith (1992), while not denying MWS’s independent contribution, points out that women of the period were conditioned to think they needed help from a man, and feels that PBS seeks to ‘control her text’ in a forced collaboration comparable with rape (pp.  274–5). Robinson, however, argues the case that PBS ‘suggested and made alterations to the text of Frankenstein for the purpose of improving an already excellent narrative’ and that ‘MWS accepted the suggestions and alterations that she agreed with’ (MYR 9.lxxvii). Some of PBS’s changes correct minor errors of grammar, expression and fact. Over all he makes the language less colloquial, more Latinate (Shelley [2008], pp. 26–7)—‘it was excited by her generous interference’ for ‘it was on her account’ (pp.  109, 304). For Mellor (1988) the prose style is ‘stilted, ornate, putatively Ciceronian’, in contrast with MWS’ own more direct and forceful manner (pp.  60, 62). Leader (1996) suggests that the retention of such ‘high or formal style’ in the editions of 1823 and 1831 suggests that MWS admires it, ‘which is partly why she accepted the revisions in the first place’ (pp. 198–9). Mellor (1988) argues that PBS blackens the creature and makes his creator less complex, more of a victim, (pp. 62–3), while for Leader (1996) Frankenstein remains ‘both victim and perpetrator’ for both MWS

  Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 

77

and PBS (p.  204). Usually the alterations develop or expand the original rather than inventing anything new. For instance, although PBS suggests that the idea of going to England should come from Victor, not his father (MYR 9.424–5), the idea of the journey itself and the creation of a female monster remains MWS’s; compare MYR 9.lxvii-viii. MWS corrected the manuscript in April 1817 (see MWSJ 166–9 and MYR 9.lxxxv). The fair copy (April-May 1817) introduced division into three volumes rather than two. 12% of the fair copy is extant, including the last nearly thirteen pages which were transcribed and edited by PBS, for unknown reasons, on about 10–13 May. MWS had most likely recopied his transcription by 3 August (see MYR 9.lxxxvii). PBS sent the fair copy to publishers as the work of a ‘friend’. It was rejected by ∗Murray in June 1817 (MWSJ 171, 174 n.4; MWSL 1.36) and by ∗Ollier in August (PBSL 1.549, 552; MWSL 1.40). ∗Lackington responded favourably in mid-August 1817 and agreed terms— one third of receipts to the author after deduction of publishing expenses—in September (PBSL 1.553; MWSJ 179–80). Proofs arrived by 23 September. MWS soon afterwards gave PBS ‘carte blanche to make what alterations you please’ (MWSL 1.42). NSW 1.xcv presents evidence that MWS was, nevertheless, ‘highly involved in the proofing process and able both to scrutinize and to initiate alterations’. Crook also points out that when PBS writes to Lackington about ‘alterations’ (PBSL 1.565) ‘as if they were his alone’ this results ‘necessarily from the … pretence that the young writer lived abroad, and had therefore authorized him to make minor stylistic corrections … at proof stage’ (NSW 1.xcv). Robinson (2016) thinks that it was probably PBS who, at this late stage, provided new matter developing Clerval’s nobility of character (p.  19; Shelley [2008], p.  33). For a late addition by MWS see ∗Hampden.

First Edition and Reviews Frankenstein was published anonymously, in three volumes, on 1 January 1818, at 16s 6d. It was dedicated to ∗Godwin and thus known to originate from someone in his circle; some readers, including ∗Scott, thought the author was PBS.  Most conservative reviewers were predictably hostile to a work with such connections and dealing with such an arguably blasphemous subject as the creation of a being by man rather than God. The most hostile response, by John Wilson Croker in The Quarterly Review for January 1818, dismissed the novel as presenting ‘a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity’, ‘written in the spirit of [Godwin’s] school. The dreams of insanity are

78 F

embodied in the strong and striking language of the insane, and the author, notwithstanding the rationality of his preface, often leaves us in doubt whether he is not as mad as his hero’ (p. 382). There are ‘passages which appal the mind and make the flesh creep’ but the work ‘inculcates no lesson of conduct, manners, or morality’ (p. 385). The Monthly Review for April 1818 concurs and feels that ‘In some passages, the writer appears to favour the doctrines of materialism’ (p.  439). La Belle Assemblée (17 March 1818) hopes that ‘the writer had the moral in view … that the presumptive works of man must be frightful, vile and horrible, ending only in discomfort and misery to himself ’ but worries that readers will fail to make this ‘application’ since it is not explicitly stated (pp. 139–40). The Edinburgh Magazine, and Literary Miscellany for 1818, p. 252, also suggests, briefly, that the aim may be to ‘shew that the powers of man have been wisely limited’ but professes, like The Gentleman’s Magazine for April 1818, p. 334, to be shocked at the very idea of man as creator. For the Edinburgh Magazine the consideration of such matters is a symptom of ‘the wild and irregular theories of the age’ more generally; and such extraordinary events as the rise and fall of ∗Napoleon have made readers crave ‘every sort of wonder and vehement interest’ (pp. 252, 249). There was much complaint about such implausibilities as how ‘the monster, by the easy process of listening at the window of a cottage, acquires a complete education’ (The Quarterly, p.  380). La Belle Assemblée finds this sequence ‘rather prolix and unnatural’ (p. 140), while the more thoughtful Scott, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine for March 1818, thinks it ‘not only highly improbable, but … injudicious, as its unnecessary minuteness tends rather too much to familiarize us with the being whom it regards, and who loses, by this lengthy oration, some part of the mysterious sublimity annexed to his first appearance’ (pp. 617–18). Scott doesn’t think the creature would have framed Justine (p. 618). The Quarterly wonders at his intention to ‘burn himself on a funeral pyre (of ice, we conjecture)’ (p. 382). Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, reviewing Valperga in 1824, doubts that ‘one with Frankenstein’s science’ would have formed such a hideous creature, and feels it ‘inconceivable’ that he should have let him escape and unlikely that he would have failed to instruct him ‘intellectually as he had formed him physically’ (p. 198). Most reviewers, however, found elements to praise. The Gentleman’s (p.  334) and the Edinburgh Magazine (p.  252) like the ‘scenery’, La Belle Assemblée the ‘easy, yet energetic style’ (p. 141). Even The British Critic allows that there are ‘occasional symptoms of no common powers of mind, struggling through a mass of absurdity’. Several writers express sympathy for the monster—for ‘his natural tendency to kind feelings, and the manner in which they were blighted’ (Edinburgh Magazine, p. 252). Knight’s confesses that ‘my

  Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 

79

interest … is entirely on the side of the monster’, who is eloquent and persuasive because ‘The justice is indisputably on his side, and his sufferings are, to me, touching to the last degree’ (p. 198). Scott’s response to the novel is much the most considered and positive. He makes a distinction between works dealing merely with the ‘marvellous’ for its own sake and those where the ‘author’s principal object … is … to open new trains and channels of thought, by placing men in supposed situations of an extraordinary and preternatural character’ (Blackwood’s, p.  614). In Frankenstein itself he identifies ‘uncommon powers of poetic imagination’; the ‘tale, though wild in incident, is written in plain and forcible English, without exhibiting that mixture of hyperbolical Germanisms with which tales of wonder are usually told’ (p. 619).

Second and Third Editions The first extant revisions to the 1818 text, made possibly as early as December that year, are those MWS inserted in a copy of the edition which she gave to a Mrs ∗Thomas in 1823. The corrections are mostly minor, often the choice of a more precise word or phrase. (See NSW 1.183–227.) Also in 1823, while MWS was still abroad, ∗Godwin, encouraged by the prospect of the opening of ∗Peake’s ∗Presumption, revised the 1818 text for the second edition. It was published in two volumes by G. and W.B. Whittaker on 11 August at 14s under the name ‘Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’. Godwin introduced 123 minor revisions (see NSW 1.xcvi–vii and 183–227), most of which MWS retained in the third edition. The third or revised edition was published in one volume at 6 shillings, on 31 October 1831, by ∗Colburn and Bentley in their Standard Novels series. The author’s name is on the engraved title-page, followed, on the title-page, by ‘The Author of The Last Man, Perkin Warbeck, &c.’. (4,020 copies were printed, compared with 500 for each of the first two editions.) MWS had sold the publishers the copyright of the novel for £30. Revisions for the third edition are extensive. They include an Introduction (first published on 22 October 1831 in the Court Journal) which supplies a detailed account of the genesis of the novel in 1816. (It may be an imaginative reconstruction or may draw on MWS’s now missing Journal for the period in question.) Among changes to the text of the novel are a more developed account of Frankenstein’s childhood. Elizabeth changes from his cousin to an unrelated orphan taken into his family. Her passionate condemnation of capital punishment (NSW 1.62, 207–8) is toned down and her regret that she

80 F

lacks Frankenstein’s opportunity to improve her mind by travel (NSW 1.118) is removed. There are more religious references (for instance the ‘guardian angel’ and the diabolical sounding ‘palpable enemy’ of NSW 1.197 and 200) and a more cautious attitude to science. Many of these changes in emphasis have been seen as evidence of the author’s increased conservatism. Religious orthodoxy may be signalled when, in the introduction, Frankenstein becomes ‘the pale student of unhallowed arts’ (NSW 1.179); alternatively this description may be designed to advertise the Gothic elements in the story. (The word ‘unhallowed’ occurs twice in 1818—NSW 1.37, 169—and five times in 1831, adding NSW 1. 179, 209 and 223.) Perhaps more emphatically orthodox is the frightfulness of ‘any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world’ (NSW 1.179). (Crook [2000a], however, points out that such language is not specifically Christian; it is ‘compatible with heterodoxies such as pantheism, Spinozism, Shaftesburyan scepticism, Romantic Deism or even Godwinism’ [p. 7].) For Butler in Shelley (1994a) such revisions are ‘acts of damage-limitation’ made inevitable by conservative (mis)interpretation of the plot as a warning against all radical scientific thought (p. l). Mellor (1990a) believes that in 1831 Frankenstein’s ‘only sin is not his failure to love and care for his Creature but his original decision to construct a human being’ (p. 36). Significant aspects of Frankenstein, however, survive the revision unchanged: above all the great overthrow, revelatory at a first reading, when the creature begins his narrative. The ‘vile insect’ (NSW 1. 74) turns out to be a powerful reasoner, his articulacy based, we go on to learn, on exposure to high literature. Antagonist becomes protagonist, at least equal to his enemy in his command of language and in his sense of injustice and entitlement. Crook (2000a) identifies a ‘halo effect’ where ‘neutral or ambivalent material’ has been ‘marshalled in support of the initial proposition’ that the revision is ‘a tamed text’, and she calls for ‘parity of esteem’ for the two versions (pp. 4, 3). Crook cites instances of MWS’s continuing radical sympathies (pp. 5–6) and suggests that Elizabeth’s new origin as the daughter of an Italian patriot is designed less to avoid possible suggestions of incest than to allow MWS to express her ‘growing support for the Italian Risorgimento’ (p. 6); Frankenstein shows culpable ‘incuriosity about the fate of Elizabeth’s father’, who possibly (NSW 1.191) ‘still lingered in the dungeons of Austria’. In 1818 her father is Italian but apparently not politically involved. ‘Politics,’ Crook suggests, ‘… have not been made blander, but they have been partially updated’ (pp. 3–4). If Elizabeth becomes less bold, that does not necessarily endorse female submissiveness. It may further indict male

  Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 

81

expectations for her, and is in keeping with her failure, even as a stronger figure in 1818, to ‘become Victor’s confidante and comrade’ (Crook [2000a], pp. 11, 20–1 n.22; see also Bohls [1995], p. 288 n. 11). A radical reference which does remain intact in 1831 is Elizabeth’s praise for the relatively classless society produced by ‘the republican institutions of our country’ (NSW 1.45–6). Butler in Shelley (1994a) feels that in 1831 Walton, Frankenstein and his father ‘are all softened, made more sympathetic and admirable’ (p. 198). There are more references to the power of fate and Frankenstein becomes, for Mellor (1990a), ‘the pawn of forces beyond his knowledge or control’, his fall ‘caused not so much by his egotistical “presumption and rash ignorance” [NSW 1.207] as by bad influences, whether his father’s ignorance [of science] or Professor Waldman’s Mephistophelian manipulations’ (p.  36). But Crook (2000a) argues that both creator and creature become ‘more deviously manipulative and more emotionally engaging’ (p. 15). More simply, it is sometimes difficult to know how far revision aims to alter character and how far it reflects the writer’s greater maturity and experience. In 1818 when Frankenstein comes home after William’s murder he seems, rather unfeelingly, to reprove the grief-stricken Ernest: ‘”Do not … welcome me thus; try to be more calm, that I may not be absolutely miserable the moment I enter my father’s house”’ (NSW 1.56). In 1831 Ernest’s tears bring home to his brother the terrible reality of his family’s desolation and ‘I tried to calm [him]’ (NSW 1.206). Is this part of the whitewashing, the softening, of Frankenstein, or just the older author providing him with a more probable, and more successfully articulated, response? Among the few reviews published in 1831 The London Literary Gazette for 19 November found Frankenstein ‘Vigorous, terrible, and with its interest sustained to the last’; unlike other female writing ‘it appeals to fear, not love; and … has less of the heart in it than the mind’; ‘we know, in all our imaginative literature, few scenes more appalling than where Frankenstein is pursuing his monstrous and vindictive enemy over the frozen deserts of the ocean’ (p. 740). Another positive review, PBS’s—the one most pertinent to modern interpretations of the novel—was written in connection with the 1818 edition but not published until 10 November 1832 in The Athenaeum. It includes the useful summation ‘Treat a person ill, and he will become wicked. Requite affection with scorn;—let one being be selected, for whatever cause, as the refuse of his kind—divide him, a social being, from society, and you impose upon him the irresistible obligations—malevolence and selfishness’ (p. 730).

82 F

Early References The opportunity for a third edition was created partly by the continuing popularity of stage adaptations. The novel’s distinctive title was also kept before readers by MWS’s other publications as ‘the Author of Frankenstein’. And its fame before 1831 is attested by references to it in some very different social contexts. ∗Peacock claimed in August 1818, seriously or not, that the book ‘seems to be universally known and read’ (Peacock [2001], vol. 1, p. 147). Dr John Richardson, naturalist on the Arctic expedition of 1819–1821, called an indigenous woman, in 1821, ‘a fit companion for Frankenstein’s chef d’oeuvre’—‘every member of her body seemed to have belonged to different individuals’ (Craciun [2011], p. 452)—suggesting already the association of race and monstrosity studied by scholars including Malchow (1993) and Brantlinger (2016). On 3 October 1823 Mr Harris of Preston appeared in a masked ball in Liverpool as Frankenstein (meaning the creature) (Shelley [2008], p. 19 and n.9). By 1831, Robinson (2016) notes, there was a racehorse called Frankenstein (p.  20; there are several references, apparently to two different horses, in The General Stud Book, volume 3 [1832] and The New Sporting Magazine for May 1833). For further examples see MYR 9.xcviii and Canning, George.

Themes One of the main themes of the novel is exclusion and its consequences: the consequences of dividing ‘a social being, from society’ (PBS’s Athenaeum review), of Frankenstein’s or society’s disastrous exclusion of women and a female perspective. Criticism of the 1970s and 1980s stressed particularly Frankenstein’s hubris in attempting to procreate without the aid of a female. For Mellor (1988) he ‘is engaged upon a rape of nature, a violent penetration and usurpation of the female’s “hiding places” [NSW 1. 32]’ (p. 122) and is punished accordingly. Walton can be seen either as another overreaching male—an explorer determined to penetrate the North-West Passage or the Arctic, a would-be imperialist vaunting his achievements to a silent sister—or as more responsive than Frankenstein to his feminine side, seeking friendship, communicating with his sister, eventually (if under duress) giving up his quest. The disastrous effects of ‘unchecked male ambition’ are implied, Charlotte Gordon suggests in Shelley (2018), by the absence of strong female characters (p. xxi). The creature is often seen as a representation or parallel of the excluded female: see, for example, Gilbert and Gubar (1979), p.  237. For Poovey

  Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 

83

(1984) ‘the narrative strategy of Frankenstein, like the symbolic presentation of the monster, enables Shelley to express and efface herself at the same time and thus, at least partially, to satisfy her conflicting desires for self-assertion and social acceptance’ (p. 131). The destruction of the female creature renders more absolute the creature’s exclusion from the norms of human life. For Mellor (1988) the destruction results above all from Frankenstein’s fear of female sexuality (p. 120), while Zonana (1991) suggests that there is a deeper fear of uncontrolled female spirituality: ‘If all women, like Safie, escaped from their harems, the patriarchy—and men like Victor Frankenstein—would be doomed’ (p. 177). Bewell (1988) considers Frankenstein himself, unusually, in a traditionally female context: the creature he effectively gives birth to was likely to be ‘monstrous’ since contemporary obstetric theory held that a pregnant woman needed a calm, domestic environment and that ‘an image placed before her eyes and strongly impressed on her imagination would be reproduced on the body of the child’ (p. 118). (Frankenstein’s ‘attention was fixed upon every object the most insupportable to the delicacy of the human feelings’ [NSW 1.35].) MWS thus ‘turns the discourse on the management of pregnant women back upon men, to argue that it is they who must learn to regulate their bodies and idealizing fantasies’ (p. 119). The creature’s exclusion or persecution can be seen also in terms of race, class, disability or sexual orientation—see McGavran (2000) for the creature as ‘a self at least partially liberated from heterosexual stereotypes of desire’ (p. 47). For overviews of some of these perspectives see Brantlinger (2016) and Haggerty (2016). A related theme is parenting—‘When it comes to parenting, Frankenstein is himself a monster’ (Butler in Shelley [1994a], p. xliv) and his failure results in the exclusion from society of both the monster and himself. Psychological and more general studies talk often of the theme of doubling or the doppelgänger: the alternation of which is hunter and which is hunted; the creature’s ‘monstrous aspect’ as a reflection of ‘his creator’s moral monstrosity’ (Shelley [2012], p.  36); the doubling of the female creature and Elizabeth—‘the hideous travesty of a woman and her anodyne ideal’ which cancel each other out (Jacobus [1986], p. 101); or of the male creature and Elizabeth, their love rejected by Frankenstein; the parallel careers of the lonely, destructive or potentially destructive discoverers Frankenstein and Walton. Two themes whose presence for readers has been increased by their prominence in later Frankenstein-related films, books and discussion are Frankenstein’s ‘playing God’ by creating life—a perspective encouraged already by the added emphasis on ‘presumption’ and the ‘unhallowed’ in 1831—and the responsibility of the scientist for his research and its outcomes.

84 F

Crouch (1978) sees MWS as posing the question whether a dedicated scientist can ‘create something that will indeed make the world a better place, and … live a happy and successful life himself? The answer … seems to be that science alone cannot create this change in man and society. Science creates power, not beauty, and power is beautiful only when it is used by humane men who are willing to be responsible for their creations’ (p. 43). Misdirected education plays a part in that failure of responsibility. (Rauch [1995] indicates some of the gaps in Frankenstein’s scientific knowledge.) By contrast Safie and the creature imbibe moral as well as factual knowledge from the texts presented to them. (But this educational programme has yet to transform the world completely: it does not enable Felix, Agatha, and Safie to judge the creature other than by appearance, or the creature to forego violence and revenge for philosophy.) Walton’s unstructured education perhaps leaves him open to the same narrowness of vision as Frankenstein. For some commentators Frankenstein is, at least in part, about the process of its own writing: see Gilbert and Gubar (1979), p. 222, and Baldick 31. According to the 1831 introduction ‘ideas about creativity shaped the genesis of the novel which in turns dwells on the dangers of creativity’ (Smith [2016b], p. 2). Many other themes have been identified. Friendship is sought by Walton and the creature, lost by Frankenstein in his solitude and selfconcern, and is at its best as shown by Elizabeth to Justine and Clerval to Frankenstein; Bennett in NSW 1.xxviii observes that ‘the very form …, story within story within story, iterates human interdependency, however accidental or unrecognized’. Colonialism is centred on the treatment of Safie and her family (see Spivak [1985] and Lew [1991]). And Frankenstein, ‘whose representative subject is a strong, natural man who seems ugly to Western eyes, symbolizes a colonizer who thought himself a philanthropist but refused to acknowledge the humanity of a new race he discovered’ (Franklin [2013], p. 38). Morton (2016) looks at attitudes to Nature in the novel; caring for the creature ‘involves accepting the super-natural’ or ‘what goes beyond our concepts of Nature’ (p. 156); for an environmentalist perspective see Hammond (2004). For another important area of interpretation see Politics. Lau (2009b) provides a useful reminder of the multivalence of the novel, which shares with The Ancient Mariner ‘its condemnation of and covert sympathy with ambitious acts of creation and self-assertion; its simultaneous celebration and undermining of intimate relationships; and [its] many distancing devices and defensive strategies’ (p. 89). One such strategy is the use of multiple, rival narrators, suggesting ‘that no authoritative voice exists’, offering ‘open-ended debates’ (Vargo [2012], p.  1218). As Lipking (1996) says,

  Frankenstein in Film and Television 

85

‘Frankenstein does not let its readers feel good. It presents them with genuine, insoluble problems, not with any easy way out’ (p. 319). See also: Frankenstein in Film and Television; Frankenstein on Stage; Frankenstein Novels; Illustrations of Mary Shelley’s Work. Further reading: Frayling (2017); Newman (1986).

Frankenstein in Film and Television Popular conceptions of Frankenstein in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been mediated chiefly through film. The first version was the silent Frankenstein (1910), adapted and directed by J. Searle Dawley for the Edison Company. Charles Ogle’s cadaverous creature has a ‘Kabuki-like expression, deformed visage, and protruding bulbous eyes’ (Forry 81). The main thesis of the film, according to the original synopsis quoted in Forry 84–5, is that ‘the creation of the monster was only possible because Frankenstein had allowed his normal mind to be overcome by evil and unnatural thoughts’; but because of the strong love between Frankenstein and Elizabeth ‘the monster cannot exist’—its image, which Frankenstein sees when he looks in the mirror, therefore gradually fades and is replaced by his own. Frankenstein, directed by James ∗Whale for Universal Studios (1931), has profoundly influenced subsequent versions of the story. Boris ∗Karloff established the most familiar appearance of the creature. The elaborate scene of the monster’s animation may be inspired by Balderston’s revision of Webling’s play (Forry 95; see Frankenstein on Stage). Elements not found in the plays, however, include a grave-robbing scene and the transformation of the Frankensteins’ home into a ∗Gothic castle and the place of the monster’s creation into a ‘cavernous laboratory’ (Forry 92). Karloff’s creature can communicate only by gesture and guttural sounds. He has been fitted with a criminal brain because of a mistake by Frankenstein’s assistant, Fritz (who derives probably from the comic character of the same name in ∗Peake’s Presumption). Nevertheless, Bloom (2010) points out, he murders only ‘in self-defence and out of inexperience’ (p.  26). Partly because his victims are not related to Frankenstein—he kills Fritz, Waldman and, accidentally, a girl called Maria who he thinks will float like a flower—for much of the film the creature is not closely connected with his creator (Bloom [2010], p. 26). ‘Evil occurs as a force from outside the characters and the community’: Frankenstein is a temporarily mad scientist (Bloom [2010], p. 24) who can be reabsorbed into society, with Elizabeth attacked as in the novel but surviving to marry him, and normality stressed by his father the Baron’s desire for the continuation of the

86 F

family and the social harmony of the villagers. Nevertheless, the film was received, in some quarters, with the same moral outrage that the novel had sometimes inspired a century earlier: in the House of Commons in February 1932 Clifford Glossop, M.P., asked the Home Secretary, with reference to film censorship, whether he was aware that ‘under existing legislation a most demoralising [immoral] film by the name of “Frankenstein” is at present being exhibited in London?’ (Hansard 261.235). Universal followed the 1931 film with several others, beginning with The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), where the monster becomes more sympathetic and Elsa Lanchester plays both MWS, in the introduction, and the female creature. (This work was one point of reference for The Bride [1985], directed by Franc Roddam with Sting as Frankenstein and Jennifer Beals as Eva, the female he creates.) A later popular Frankenstein series was released by Hammer Films between 1957 and 1973. In The Curse of Frankenstein (1957, directed by Terence Fisher) Peter Cushing’s cruel, arrogant Frankenstein, older than his predecessors, dominates the action while Christopher Lee’s monster ‘is a shambling, mute agent of destruction’ (Dixon [1990], p. 175). Cushing played his part five more times. Dixon (1990) contrasts with these and with all other Frankenstein films Victor Frankenstein (directed by Calvin Floyd, Aspekt Films, 1976), which is mostly faithful to the novel, using the Walton frame and allowing its creature, Per Oscarsson, to speak and to emerge as ‘an intellectual adversary, not just a physical brute whose intelligence is ruled by infantile rages and fears’ (p. 177). Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was directed by Kenneth Branagh, who also played Frankenstein, in 1994. In spite of the title it departs in spirit from the novel as much as most other versions. Hopkins (2005) points to its inconsistent mixture of modern and nineteenth-century registers and its abandonment of the Gothic for ‘a rather trite parable about overwork and the potential dangers of science’ (pp. 72–3). Robert De Niro’s monster is more sympathetic than many. Helena Bonham Carter’s Elizabeth is stronger and more ­passionate than MWS’s; an original feature of this version is Frankenstein’s resurrection of her as an equivalent for the female monster in the novel by sewing her head onto Justine’s body. Subsequent film versions include I, Frankenstein (directed by Stuart Beattie, 2014), in which the monster is ‘turned into a kind of supernatural superhero’ (Jancovich [2016], p. 202) and Victor Frankenstein (directed by Paul McGuigan, 2015). The Frankenstein myth also influences other films involving the artificial creation of life, for example Blade Runner (1982) and The Terminator (1984).

  Frankenstein on Stage 

87

Comic or parodic Frankensteins include Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein [meaning the monster] (1948) and Young Frankenstein, directed by Mel Brooks and written by Brooks with Gene Wilder (1974). Here, with the aid of brain-transference, the creature and the creator (Frankenstein’s grandson) finally and happily change places and doubling between Elizabeth and the laboratory assistant Inga is explored. Frank N. Furter and his creation Rocky figure in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1976, based on a stage production of 1973). Victor reanimates his dead dog Sparky in Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie (2012), a ‘comic-horror’ stop-start animated film expanding Burton’s 1984 short. Television versions include one for Thames Television (1968) in which Ian Holm plays both creator and creature, and Frankenstein: the True Story (NBC, 1973), adapted by Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. Here, new permutations of the story include a monster whose reanimation process reverses so that he becomes steadily uglier. The first series of The Frankenstein Chronicles (ITV Encore, 2015), directed and co-written by Benjamin Ross, involves police investigation of a corpse made from parts of eight different children in nineteenth-century London; the villain is working to reanimate the dead, and Frankenstein is inspired by MWS’s early involvement in an unsuccessful attempt at such reanimation. Further reading: Eberle-Sinatra (1998); Frankensteinia; Friedman and Kavey (2016); Cutchins and Perry (2018).

Frankenstein on Stage The commercially successful first adaptation (see Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein) was soon joined by other melodramatic and burlesque versions. Jean-Toussaint Merle’s and Antoine Béraud’s Le Monstre et le magicien was given ninety-four times at the Théâtre de la Porte-Martin in Paris between June and November 1826 (Forry 11). It influenced revivals of Presumption, was translated by John Kerr as Frankenstein; or, the Monster and the Magician (1826) and ‘inspired Henry Milner to write The Man and the Monster [1826], the only serious long-term rival of Presumption’ (Forry 13). These plays continued to be performed frequently until the 1840s. Characterization here is simpler than in the novel: Frankenstein becomes ‘a fallen protagonist, a modern hero-villain whose crimes we exonerate because of his exaggerated remorse’ and the monster ‘a typical villain-hero’ (Forry 21). A major appeal was the lavish staging, with ∗Gothic castles, chambers and forests (Forry 15) and

88 F

Frankenstein and the creature perishing at first by avalanche and then in a violent sea-storm or, in the burlesque Another Piece of Presumption (1823), a deluge of cabbages and cauliflowers. In this play Frankinstitch, a tailor, puts the creature together from parts of his colleagues. Among other comic pieces were Humgumption; or, Dr. Frankenstein and the Hobgoblin of Hoxton (1823; no text survives) and Frank-in-Steam, or, the Modern Promise to Pay (1824). Robert and William Brough’s Frankenstein; or, the Model Man (1849), with strong elements of pantomime, is the first play to show the creature, ‘A colossal human figure of a cadaverous livid complexion’, coming to life. The next significant and popular adaptation was Peggy Webling’s Frankenstein: an Adventure in the Macabre (1927); the revision for Broadway by John Balderston (1930) was not performed since Universal Studios, in preparation for the 1931 film (see Frankenstein in Film and Television), bought the rights to both his and Webling’s work (Forry 92). Webling’s play has a strong religious element, uses Dr Waldman as a moral arbiter and introduces the theme of doubling which would remain common in film treatments; as in many films, too, the creature is ‘a loutish brute’ who mumbles ‘inchoate syllables’ (Forry 96, 99). While film became dominant after 1931 in disseminating the Frankenstein myth, Forry 123–6 lists over seventy stage dramatizations between 1933 and 1986 and there have been many more, in many countries, since then. From the 1980s, direct dramatization of material from the novel became more widespread. Particular interest was excited by Frankenstein, adapted by Nick Dear and directed by Danny Boyle, which opened at the Royal National Theatre in London in February 2011. Here, suggesting the theme of doubling, Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller alternated in the roles of creature and creator. The production began with the creature in an ‘opening coup de théâtre, in which’ he ‘dropped buck-naked onto the stage from a huge, pulsing artificial womb and for several minutes writhed into glistening life in front of a stunned audience’ (Holmes [2017]). Billington (2011) feels that ‘Because Victor himself hardly figures until halfway through the action, his initial hubris in animating lifeless matter is minimised’ and that ‘Shelley’s rage against existing social structures is muted’. Dear and Boyle succeed, ­however, in ‘constantly making us ask which of the two main characters is the real monster. … The issue is not so much resolved as left hanging as the two figures memorably depart into an eternal icy wilderness’ (Billington [2011]). There have been operatic versions of the novel by Joseph Baber (1976), Gregory Sandow (1982) and Libby Larsen (1990); the monster is one of the characters in Alan Jaffe’s Mary Shelley (2002). A musical version of Mel Brooks’s film Young Frankenstein, with music by Brooks, was first performed

  Frankenstein Novels 

89

in 2007. The Royal Ballet Frankenstein, choreographed by Liam Scarlett with music by Lowell Liebermann, opened in May 2016. Here, since there can be no speech, the creature seems more limited, more an instinctual being, than in the book. But he longs for the love which is a main theme of the production. (Frankenstein and Elizabeth are happier together than elsewhere; dancing, they are often in each other’s arms.) The final emphasis, as Frankenstein shoots himself and the creature cradles his body, seems more on misfortune, on unfulfilled love, than on guilt or apportioning blame. What is lost, for Jennings (2016), is a sense of Frankenstein’s ‘morbidly obsessive egotism’; when he creates the monster ‘There’s no sense of the unholy grandeur and ghastliness of the event’. On Frankenstein and ballet see further Davison (2018b).

Frankenstein Novels Many novels derive from, revise, parody, extend, or are analogous to Frankenstein. (For a sense of their range see the list in Glut [1984], pp. 25–56.) There are science-fiction, horror, children’s, comic, satirical, graphic and pornographic versions. Some concern Frankenstein’s descendants (often called Dr or Baron or Baroness) or combine or align MWS’s characters or their film-­ descendants with ∗Dracula or Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Sequels are set in America and the Arctic and on Bodmin Moor (see Glut [1984], pp. 41, 45, 45–6); Jonathan Wright’s translation of Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad was published in 2018. While the broad outline of MWS’s novel often survives, there are many variations. Kate Horsley’s The Monster’s Wife (2014) tells the story of the making of the female creature, who in Shelley Jackson’s hypertext Patchwork Girl (1995) is completed by MWS herself, becomes her lover and exists until the late twentieth century. Theodore Roszak’s The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein (1995) introduces another narrative perspective. Punter (2016) usefully examines novels including Brian Aldiss’s Frankenstein Unbound (1973), a time-travel story which is also ‘a work of intertextuality, almost a compendium of Frankenstein’, and Susan Heyboer O’Keefe’s Frankenstein’s Monster (2010), where Walton converts his love for the dead Frankenstein into obsessive hatred of the creature (pp. 208, 212–14). Punter goes on to offer an explanation of the ‘continuing fascination of the Frankenstein scenario’ in terms of ‘what the lust for knowledge … represents or conceals, as it becomes a carapace over a lonely, suffering self which has given up on familial or social attachment’ (p. 217). Further reading: Cutchins and Perry (2018).

90 F

Franklin, Benjamin (1706–1790) American scientist, diplomat and statesman. In the 1818 Frankenstein Alphonse, explaining and demonstrating electricity to his son, makes a kite ‘which drew down that fluid from the clouds’ (NSW 1.27) as Franklin did. The name Frankenstein may be influenced by Franklin, who ‘had been delving into the secrets of life and death’ and was hailed by ∗Condorcet as a ‘Modern ∗Prometheus’ (Roberts [1990], p. 101).

French Lives MWS worked on Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of France between late 1837 and summer 1839. The first volume was published anonymously in ∗Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia on 1 August 1838 and the second on 1 September 1839. MWS, who wrote all the lives apart from those of Rabelais and La Fontaine, was paid £200 for each volume: see LL 2.lviii n.14. In1840, the work was pirated as French Writers of Eminence (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard) by ‘Mrs Shelley and Others’ (LL 2.xlii). For the only known review of any substance see Poe, Edgar Allan. The most important of the many sources for French Lives are ∗Voltaire’s Siècle de Louis XIV (1751), the Biographie universelle et portative des contemporains (1836) and the histories of the ∗French Revolution by Adolphe Thiers (1823–1827) and ∗Carlyle (1837) (LL 2.xliii). Among the main concerns of the Lives are the power of the Roman Catholic church and the monarchy and their subjects’ resistance or accommodation to them; the relation between private and public life (∗Roland combined domestic virtues with political activity while ∗Rousseau, for all his distinction as a writer, failed utterly in his duty to his children); the qualities of loyalty and generosity which often balance political or literary imperfections; the stultifying effect of neoclassical rules and prescriptions especially on the plays of ∗Corneille and ∗Racine. In the first volume MWS’s challenge is ‘to avoid seeming to endow the seventeenth century, a period of royal and aristocratic dominance, with nostalgic glamour, while achieving historical empathy’ (LL 2.xlv). She engages particularly closely with the biographies of the subjects, in volume two, closest to her own time and political concerns, especially those connected with the Revolution, its causes and its aftermath, including Voltaire, Rousseau, ∗Condorcet, ∗Mirabeau, Roland and ∗Staël. Further reading: Morrison (2004); Palacio.

  French Revolution 

91

French Revolution MWS’s detailed grasp of the events of 1789–1793 was fuelled by extensive reading (see French Lives); her sense of personal involvement proceeds from republican ideals, the awareness that ∗Wollstonecraft had witnessed the Terror at close hand, and the close engagement of ∗Godwin and other English reformers with the initial, reasoned, optimistic phase of the Revolution (see ‘Life of William Godwin’, LL 4.41, 49, 60, 72). In French Lives she writes the biographies of figures involved mainly in this early period—∗Condorcet, ∗Mirabeau, ∗Roland—rather than its bloody climax. Like a number of other writers of her generation, she regards the Revolution as a whole with some ambivalence. It promised ‘the overthrow of feudal abuses, and the restoration of the oppressed majority of the French nation to the rights of men and citizens’ (‘Mirabeau’, LL 3.410) and, in 1816 at least, she believed that the Revolution, ‘notwithstanding the temporary bloodshed and injustice with which it was polluted, has produced enduring benefits to mankind’ (MWSL 1.20). But the philosophes were naïve in supposing that ‘bigotry and superstition being overthrown, persecution would vanish, and mankind live in a brotherhood of peace’ and become, through the equal development of reason, ‘like themselves, dispassionate and tolerant’ (‘Condorcet’, LL 3.368). Instead, in the hands of ‘base and sanguinary men, grandeur of purpose merged into ferocity, and heroism became a thirst of blood’ unequalled among ‘men of the same colour and language’ (LL 3.373–4). Frankenstein can be seen as a parabolic treatment of the French Revolution: an account of an ‘attempt to recreate man and the disillusionment and terror that followed’ (Paulson [1981], p.  545). The creature becomes, in various readings, ‘an emblem of the multitude, or [∗Napoleon] Bonaparte, or revolutionary energy’ (Crook [2012], p.  112). Douthwaite (2012) examines his ‘interaction with the De Lacey family’ as ‘a parable of the failed republican ideal’ (p. 93). Further reading: Baldick; Sterrenburg (1979).

Fuseli, Henry (1741–1825) Swiss painter, born Johann Heinrich Füssli, who worked in ∗London for much of his career. MWS knew of Mary ∗Wollstonecraft’s unrequited love for him from ∗Godwin’s account in Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’ (1798).

92 F

It is widely believed that the description of Elizabeth in Frankenstein (NSW 150), alone on a bed, ‘lifeless and inanimate, … her pale and distorted features half covered by her hair’, ‘flung by the murderer on [her] bridal bier’, is suggested by Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781). (See Joseph [1975].) Veeder (1986), pp.  192–3, points to Idris’s similar posture in The Last Man (NSW 4.277) Further reading: Roberts (1990).

G

Galloni, (Anna) Laura (1809–1880) Elder daughter of Mrs ∗Mason and Tighe; from November 1832 she was (unhappily) married to Adolphe Galloni d’Istria (1808–1853). MWS met the child ‘Laurette’ in ∗Pisa in 1819 and wrote ‘Maurice’ for her. Later she was closer to CC but MWS continued to correspond with her and they saw each other again in ∗Florence in 1842. (For MWS’s frustration at the difficulty of helping her in her depression and boredom, see MWSL 3.55–6.) Galloni became a novelist, sending Italian manuscript material to MWS in the late 1840s: see Inez de Medina. Her work began to be published only after MWS’s death. Further reading: Clemit (2009); Clemit (2013).

Galvani, Luigi (1737–1798) Physician and physicist. Frankenstein’s idea that ‘if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might … renew life’ from death (NSW 1.37) is ‘suggestive’ of Galvani’s inducing of muscular convulsions in frogs in 1786 and the later application of the ‘Galvanic battery’ to executed criminals by his nephew, Giovanni or John Aldini (1762–1834) (NSW 1.37; Mellor [1988], pp.  105–6). In the 1831 Introduction MWS says, with reference to the

© The Author(s) 2019 M. Garrett, The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Palgrave Literary Dictionaries, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56639-3_7

93

94 G

c­ onversation on ‘the nature of the principle of life’, that ‘Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things’ (NSW 1.179).

Garcilaso de la Vega (c.1501–1536) Spanish Renaissance poet and soldier. In Spanish Lives he is rated as the ‘most harmonious, easy, elegant, and tender poet Spain ever produced: soft and melancholy, he never errs, except in sometimes following the fashion of his country in reasoning on his feelings, instead of simply declaring them’ (LL 2.55). MWS’s main, closely followed source for Garcilaso is the material provided in J.H. Wiffen’s translation of 1823 (LL 2.xxix).

Gaskell, Elizabeth (1810–1865) Novelist. In a ‘creative misreading’ (Baldick 86–7), ‘The actions of the uneducated seem to me typified in those of Frankenstein [sic], that monster of many human qualities, ungifted with a soul, a knowledge of the difference between good and evil. The people rise up to life … Why have we made them what they are; a powerful monster, yet without the inner means for peace and happiness?’ (Mary Barton [1848], chapter 15).

Gatteschi, Ferdinando (fl.1843–1845) Risorgimento activist and ‘adventurer’ (Rossetti [1890], p.  234). MWS met him and other Italian exiles in Paris in August 1843. She was enthused by his political views, translated his essay on the Carbonari for Rambles and gave him money; publication of Rambles was intended to raise more (MWSL 3.101). In autumn 1845 he attempted to blackmail her by threatening to make public her no doubt ‘imprudently gushing’ (Rossetti [1890], p. 235) letters to him. They were ‘written with an open heart—& contain details with regard to my past history, which it w[oul]d destroy me for ever if they saw light’ (MWSL 3.206). As a result of efforts by ∗Knox on her behalf, the French authorities seized Gatteschi’s papers, allowing Knox to remove the letters, which were then destroyed.

  Genlis, Stéphanie Félicité du Crest de Saint-Aubin, Comtesse de 

95

 enlis, Stéphanie Félicité du Crest de Saint-Aubin, G Comtesse de (1746–1830) Writer on education and historical novelist. Between 1815 and 1818 (see MWSJ 648) MWS read works by Genlis including Adèle et Théodore; ou lettres sur l’éducation (1782) and Nouveaux contes moraux et nouvelles historiques (1802). See also: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus: Sources.

Genoa City in the Kingdom of Sardinia. MWS lived, at Casa Negroto in Albaro, near Genoa, from September 1822 until she set off for England in July 1823. She and her infant son shared the accommodation with Leigh and Marianne ∗Hunt and their family.

Germany MWS travelled in various German states briefly in August-September 1814 (see MWSJ and HSWT in NSW 8.34–8) and more extensively in June-July 1840, June-August 1842 and July-October 1846. Frankenstein studies at ∗Ingolstadt and Clerval enthuses about the Rhine (NSW 1.119–20); for the Germanic associations of the name ‘Frankenstein’ see Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus: Names. In the 1840s trips she sought health cures at such spas as Bad Kissingen and Baden Baden (which had featured earlier as a setting in Falkner) and visited art galleries as often as possible, particularly in ∗Dresden. She felt consciously less at home in Germany than in ∗Italy, a distinction reflected in the unequal coverage of the two countries in Rambles. She struggled with the ‘crabbed, and to my memory, antipathetic’ language (NSW 8.175), although she eventually attained some ability to read and translate from it: see ‘Cecil’. She professed high expectations of ‘a race in which women are respected—a race that loves justice and truth’, ‘a land of forests and heroes’, Luther and German literature (NSW 8.165); but in October 1842 she reflected ‘I do dislike the Germans—& never wish to visit Germany again—but I would not put this in print—for the surface is all I know …’ (MWSL 3.42).

96 G

MWS read German authors (in translation) including ∗Goethe, ∗Schiller and ∗Wieland and was familiar with ∗Staël’s De L’Allemagne. (For further German reading and influences, see Bridgwater [2013].) Generally in literature ‘The Germans subtilise, mystify, and cloud the real and distinct: they dissolve flesh and blood into a dream’ (LL 2.251). German translations of Frankenstein have appeared regularly since Heinz Widtmann’s (Leipzig, 1912). For a list up to 2000, see Shelley (2009). Verney, der Letzte Mensch, translated from The Last Man by Ralph Tegtmeier, was first published in 1982.

‘The Ghost of the Private Theatricals’ see The Keepsake. Gibbon, Edward (1737–1794) Historian. MWS read The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788) between January and April 1815 and read or listened to PBS reading chapters of it in late 1816, August 1817 and June 1818 (MWSJ 648–9). She read his memoirs and letters, in Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon (1796), in February 1815 (MWSJ 62–4; see also NSW 2.131, 3.84 n.c). See also: Rome.

Gilfillan, George (1813–1878) Scottish churchman and author. His brief biography of MWS, first published in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1845, constructs her life, Vargo (2008) notes, ‘to echo the conventional marriage plot so acceptable to Victorian bourgeois ideology’ and ‘initiates her diminished role as wife of Shelley’ (p. 16).

‘Giovanni Villani’ see Villani, Giovanni Gisborne, Maria (1770–1836) Friend of ∗Godwin, ∗Wollstonecraft and the Shelleys. She briefly looked after the baby MWS following her mother’s death. Godwin proposed ­marriage

  ‘God of the best the brightest’ 

97

to her in 1799 following her first husband’s death. (As Maria Reveley, she features in ‘Life of William Godwin’.) From 1801 she lived in ∗Italy, from 1815 at Livorno, with her second husband, John Gisborne (1770–1836). She called on MWS and PBS in May 1818 and a close friendship began in 1819; in summer 1820, the Shelleys lived in the Gisbornes’ house during their visit to England. A rift developed between the two families that autumn (see MWSJ 334–5 n.2) but they were reconciled in summer 1821 before the Gisbornes returned permanently to England, where MWS visited them in 1823. The two women continued to correspond until shortly before Maria Gisborne’s death. Further reading: Joffe (2007b).

‘God of the best the brightest’ Short poem or ‘effusion’ (LL 4.lxxx) included in letters to ∗Guiccioli on 30 December 1824 and to Louisa Holcroft (see Kenney, James and Louisa) on 6 January 1825 (MWSL 1.459, 464). It is uncertain whether MWS herself is the author.

Godwin, Fanny Imlay (1794–1816) Half-sister of MWS, daughter of ∗Wollstonecraft and Gilbert Imlay. Following her mother’s death she grew up as a member of ∗Godwin’s family, where she seems to have been overshadowed by MWS and CC. The letters from MWS adapted in History of a Six Weeks’ Tour were probably addressed to her (see MWSL 1.19 n.1). Fanny Godwin killed herself in Swansea on 9 October 1816. She may have been motivated by the tension of her divided loyalties to the separated Godwin and Shelley households, possible unrequited love for PBS, or a probable rejected request to live with him and MWS. Further reading: Todd (2007).

Godwin, Mary Jane (1768–1841) MWS’s stepmother. She was born Mary Jane Vial but called herself Mrs Clairmont before she and William ∗Godwin married in 1801. By earlier liaisons with Charles Gaulis and Sir John Lethbridge (see Stafford [2011–2014])

98 G

she was the mother of MWS’s step-siblings Charles ∗Clairmont and Mary Jane (Claire) ∗Clairmont. She was responsible for the day to day upbringing of the five children in the new joint family. In 1805 she set up with her husband the publishing and bookselling business (it became M.J. Godwin & Co. in 1807) which published the Juvenile Library. The Family Robinson Crusoe, her translation of a version of the work by J. Wyss later known as The Swiss Family Robinson, appeared in 1814. Some of William Godwin’s friends found it difficult to accept his second wife as a worthy successor to ∗Wollstonecraft, and this, as well as MWS’s veneration for her mother’s memory and love and admiration for her father, contributed to tensions in Mary Jane Godwin’s relationship with her stepdaughter. In 1811 William Godwin explained to a correspondent that ‘The present Mrs Godwin … is not exclusively a follower of [Wollstonecraft] … [N]either Mrs Godwin nor I have leisure enough for reducing novel theories of education to practice’ (Paul [1876], vol. 2, pp. 213–14). Writing to PBS in October 1814, MWS says she detests her and claims that she ‘plagues my father out of his life’ (MWSL 1.3). In later life, she was jealous at the amount of time father and daughter spent together. Jump (1999), however, gathers evidence for a more harmonious relationship between the two women in Mary Jane Godwin’s last years—perhaps it was her ‘unswerving devotion to Godwin which finally endeared her to her stepdaughter’ (p. 307)—and for the role of later biographers in exaggerating her deficiencies. ‘Life of William Godwin’ was intended to raise money for her.

Godwin, William (1756–1836) Social philosopher, novelist, husband of ∗Wollstonecraft and father of MWS. Father and daughter enjoyed a very close relationship. In childhood, she suggested, her attachment to him was ‘excessive & romantic’ (MWSL 2.215); still in 1817 ‘the idea of his silent quiet disapprobation makes me weep as it did in the days of my childhood’ (MWSL 1.57) and ‘Until I knew Shelley I may justly say that he was my God’ (MWSL 1.296). He was the primary agent of her education and ‘she persisted in [his] regimen of daily study, blending literature with works of political, historical, and scientific theory’ (Clemit [1993], pp. 142–3). He attempted to instil in her a belief in the supreme importance of reason, rational debate and the life of the mind. His apparent emotional coldness and her ‘excessive & romantic’ response have been seen, sometimes rather simplistically, as explaining her psychological need, for the rest of her life, for intense and requited love and friendship.

  Godwin, William 

99

Mellor (1988) reads Mathilda as embodying MWS’s ‘most powerfully repressed fantasy: the desire both to sexually possess and to punish her father’ (p. 195) and goes on to examine the ‘same female hostility to the dominating father’ more indirectly present in Lodore and Falkner (p. 201). Tensions in the adult relationship between father and daughter arose from his disapproval of her elopement with PBS (ended by their marriage in December 1816), his financial problems and demands, and his insistence that she should not give way to grief at the loss of her children (see PBSL 2.241 n.2 and Paul [1876], vol. 2, pp. 269–70). For a time PBS, who provided Godwin with considerable sums of money, attempted to protect her from further anxiety by vetting, or preventing her from seeing, her father’s letters (see e.g. PBSL 2.109). In January 1824 ‘My father’s situation his cares and debts prevent my enjoying his society’ (MWSJ 472); his bankruptcy followed in 1825 (see MWSJ 472 n.2). Nevertheless, they remained close, seeing each other often, for the remainder of his life; Clemit (1999) importantly re-evaluates their professional relationship between 1823 and 1836, when they advised and undertook research for each other and MWS negotiated with publishers on her father’s behalf and promoted his work in her review of Cloudesley and her ‘Memoirs of William Godwin’ (pp.  289–92). In his last years, Clemit (1999) argues, they formed ‘a creative literary partnership based on shared reformist beliefs’ and notably enacting ‘an egalitarian professional relationship between men and women’ (pp. 286, 293). After his death, however, she felt unable to print the anti-religious views of his ‘The Genius of Christianity Unveiled’ (1834–1836) and the same caution may have led her to stop work on his ‘equally unorthodox life’ (LL 4.xvi) (see ‘Life of William Godwin’). MWS engaged with Godwin’s work throughout her life. Between 1814 and 1821 she records reading and re-reading particularly An Enquiry … Concerning Political Justice (1793 and many later editions) and the novels Things as They Are; or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), St Leon; a Tale of the Sixteenth Century (1799), Fleetwood; or, the New Man of Feeling (1805) and Mandeville. A Tale of the Seventeenth Century in England (1817) (MWSJ 649–50). Godwin, not a man to praise a work unless he sincerely valued it, told his daughter in September 1823 that ‘Frankenstein is universally known; and though it can never be a book for vulgar reading, is everywhere respected. It is the most wonderful work to have been written at twenty years of age that I ever heard of ’ (Paul [1876], vol. 2, p. 282). For his involvement with other novels see Mathilda and Valperga. Commentators have discussed many links between the two authors’ works. Brewer (2001) provides a detailed examination of their novels as ‘mental anatomies’, differentiated by MWS’s departure from Godwin’s belief in human perfectibility and by her exploration of ‘the mental development of women’

100 G

(p.  28). Clemit (1993) looks at a Frankenstein which ‘expands Godwin’s characteristic blend of philosophy and fiction to present an uncompromising critique of optimistic myths of revolutionary change’ (pp.  154–5) and discusses Valperga and The Last Man in the same perspective (pp.  175–210). Butler in Shelley (1994a) points out that Caleb Williams ‘supplies the ideological positioning of the two main protagonists, one high prestige and one low, and the cleverly-worked device of the chase in which first one is the hunter, then the other’ (p. xxxiii); Falkland and Caleb share with Frankenstein and his creature a ‘complex bond of fear and fascination’ (Clemit [2003], p. 32). St Leon’s pursuit of the elixir of life, and its destruction of his domestic happiness, prefigure Frankenstein’s career. Clemit (1999) studies the novelists’ mutual influence, including the ‘ironic treatment of the principle of legitimate succession’ in Perkin Warbeck and Cloudesley (1830), Godwin’s probable use there of the account of Raymond in The Last Man as a source in his early chapters, and the parallels between MWS’s Falkner and the protagonist of Godwin’s Deloraine (1833) (pp. 288–9). More generally, Godwin and MWS share an interest in flawed protagonists and in the opposition between individual and society. Further reading: Hill-Miller (1995); Chatterjee (2007).

Godwin, William, Junior (1803–1832) Son of William and Mary Jane ∗Godwin, half-brother of MWS. In 1812 ∗Burr heard him deliver his weekly lecture, probably written by MWS, ‘The Influence of Government on the Character of the People’ (Burr [1838], volume 2, p. 307). He was a parliamentary reporter for The Morning Chronicle and wrote essays and a novel, Transfusion; or, the Orphans of Unwalden (see MWSL 1.435 n.2.), which was initially advertised, in 1835, as edited by MWS (see Palacio 433–4 and NSW 1.240). He died in the cholera outbreak which killed over 32,000 people in Britain in 1831–1833.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749–1832) Poet, novelist and dramatist. In Rambles MWS admires his ‘insight into the secret depths of the human mind; his power of dissecting motives’ and his scenes of pathos and eloquence, but, unlike ∗Schiller, ‘he wants completeness, and never achieves a whole’ (NSW 8.183).

  Goldoni, Carlo 

101

In 1815 she had read The Sorrows of Werter, probably the translation by Daniel Malthus or Richard Graves (1779) of Goethe’s Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers (1774) (MWSJ 88). Frankenstein’s creature finds that ‘The gentle and domestic manners it described, combined with lofty sentiments and feelings, which had for their object something out of self, accorded well with my experience among my protectors and with the wants which were for ever alive in my own bosom’; he wonders at Werther’s ‘disquisitions upon death and suicide’, weeps his extinction ‘without precisely understanding it’, and learns from his ‘imaginations despondency and gloom’ (NSW 1.95–6). Burwick (1993) finds connections between Werther and Frankenstein, both of whom are ‘isolated by … self-centeredness which ultimately prohibits any close human relationship. Like Frankenstein, Werther is loved despite his own inability for altruistic affection’ (p.  49). MWS rejected both ‘male self-­ dramatization’ and her mother’s (arguable) Werther-like ‘stylization of herself and her sorrows from unrequited love’ (p. 51). She was later familiar with ∗Carlyle’s translation from Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (NSW 2.342; Carlyle [1970–], vol. 11, pp. 220–1). There are also evident parallels between Goethe’s Faust and Frankenstein with their over-reaching main characters prepared to give all for quasi-divine power and to sacrifice others, especially women, in the process. Shattuck (1996) sees the two works as ‘versions of a single myth—the learned doctor discontent with his lot and seeking release into superhuman life’ (p. 85) and the novel, which sees male glory in a much more negative light, as a female ‘retort to Faust’ (p. 93). Sunstein 427 n.12 points out that MWS had some familiarity with Faust as early as 1815, when she read Staël’s De l’Allemagne, which includes extracts (MWSJ 89).

Goldoni, Carlo (1707–1793) Venetian playwright. MWS read his French Mémoires in 1815 and his plays by the late 1820s (see LL 1.lv). The memoirs are the chief source of ‘Goldoni’ in Italian Lives. MWS recognizes the reforming ‘perfect fidelity to nature’ (LL 1.248) of his plays but finds in them a ‘dry, analytical spirit’ (LL 1.238). His work is a school of Italian manners ‘in their gayest, lightest guise’, before ‘the Italians … awoke to the sense of their oppression’ after the ∗French Revolution (LL 1.230). Restricted from showing ‘the darker shades of society’, his plays ‘often sink into childishness’ (‘Modern Italian Romances’, LL 4.258).

102 G

Góngora y Argote, Luis de (1561–1627) Baroque poet. ‘Góngora’ in Spanish Lives finds fault with his abuse of fellow authors and his ‘inflated and tortuous style’ (NSW 2.216): ‘in what a jungle of interminable words, and heterogeneous ideas, this mistaken poet lost himself ’ (224). He can exhibit ‘a sort of dusky gorgeousness’ but claims for the poems’ great originality and superiority are ridiculous (226). MWS is perhaps, in pointing out the sort of faults in Góngora for which PBS was unfairly censured by ‘∗Hazlitt and others’, ‘obscurely vindicating’ her husband (LL 2.xxxii). Góngora himself relished and cultivated difficulty; between his own time and the twentieth century, he was mostly either ignored or censured, as by MWS, for obscurity. Her main sources for the life are José López de Sedano’s Parnaso Español (1768–1778) and ∗Sismondi.

Gore, Catherine (1798–1861) Writer associated particularly with the ∗Silver-fork novel. Many of her works were published by ∗Colburn. MWS mentions, soon after publication, The Tuileries (1831), Pin Money (1831) and The Fair of May Fair (1832) (MWSL 2.135, 142, 158). The Hamiltons is ‘very clever … but how very political—& how radical’ (MWSL 2.199). Her work, with that of ∗Bulwer and ∗Disraeli, is a general influence on the high society settings of Lodore and Falkner. MWS was acquainted with Gore’s daughter, Cecilia; Gore herself lived mostly in ∗Paris and Brussels between 1830 and 1850. When MWS was in Paris in December 1840 ∗Norton wrote to Gore to ask if she could introduce her to friends who might lift her low spirits (see Atkinson [2012], p. 292 and n.23).

Goring, Augusta (1807–1875) Friend of MWS, married from 1827 to Harry Dent Goring. They first knew each other probably in 1836. From 1838 she lived with ∗Trelawny. After 1838, probably because of MWS’s poor relations with him, they continued their relationship by correspondence rather than in person; despite her history of ‘helping those who chose to live outside the rules of society’, Gordon

 Gothic 

103

(2015) suggests, MWS was not prepared, in this case, to risk her own or her son’s social standing (p. 525). Goring was divorced by her husband in 1841 and married Trelawny in 1846. When she first knew MWS, according to Trelawny, she found ‘a gentle frankness in her manner, and a vague remembrance of the thought and feelings in her books’ (see MWSJ 609).

Gothic By 1816 MWS had read Gothic novels and tales by ∗Beckford, ∗Radcliffe, ∗Lewis, ∗Schiller and ∗Brown (Wieland [1798] and Edgar Huntly [1799]), PBS’s Zastrozzi (1810), Veit Weber’s The Sorcerer (1795), and Christiane Naubert’s Hermann von Unna (1788) (MWSJ 90, 48, 92, 28, 92, 94, 89, 45, 34, 28, 129). In 1815 she read a translation of Gottfried August Bürger’s Gothic ballad ‘Lenore’ (MWSJ 89). At ∗Villa Diodati in 1816 she read ∗Fantasmagoriana, the ghost stories PBS heard Lewis tell, Christabel (see Coleridge, Samuel Taylor) and Charles Maturin’s Bertram (1816) (MWSJ 131). She later read one of the results of the competition proposed by ∗Byron at Diodati—his vampire fragment, published with Mazeppa in 1819 and mentioned in the 1831 introduction to Frankenstein (NSW 1.177)—and no doubt the works by ∗Polidori which also had their origin there. (See also, for Polidori’s idea for the tale of ‘a skull-headed lady’, NSW 1.178). Subsequently she saw Der Freischütz (see Weber, Carl Maria von) and was aware of Adalbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (1814) (MWSL 1.519). Frankenstein can be seen either as contrasting with most of these works by its insistence on asking difficult moral questions, or as closely related to them, sharing not only a desire to ‘awaken thrilling horror’ (NSW 1.178) but a ‘Chinese-box structure’ of different narrators, letters and documents, secrets, persecution and pursuit. Crook (2012) looks at the ‘props of Gothic terror’ as disguised in Frankenstein: ‘The mouldering abbey is transformed into Victor’s laboratory, with Victor as cloistered monk/student’; there is a ‘buried incest motif ’, ‘The towering spectre becomes an artificial man eight feet high’; ‘The Creature … is explicitly compared to a vampire and a mummy. The embargoed secret is that of human creation itself ’ (p. 110). Beyond these features, the novel speaks to ‘unconscious and inexplicable sources of psychic disturbance’; in it ‘the instinctual self, separated from the conscious will, reemerges, stigmatized as criminal’ and there are ‘intimations of an “unspeakable” sexual underworld of androgyny, homoeroticism, necrophilia, and bestiality’ (Crook [2012], p.  111). Wright (2016), having noted that discussions of ‘female Gothic’ rarely give much prominence to Frankenstein, argues that the 1831

104 G

version and its introduction embrace ‘the terror of a particularly female strain of gothic literature’ (p. 113). Other Gothic or Gothic-influenced features of MWS’s work include the inexorable progress of the plague in the ‘danse macabre’ (Crook [2012], p. 115) of The Last Man; the exchange of forms between Guido and the ‘misshapen dwarf ’ in ‘Transformation’; the effects of the elixir in ‘The Mortal Immortal’ and of the supposed eponymous ‘Evil Eye’; and incestuous desire, the heroine’s desperate pursuit of her father and her longing to die, in Mathilda. (Miller [2008], however, studies Mathilda not as the submissive victim the heroine of female Gothic has often been considered, but as ‘a heroine whose performative activities code her as a powerful actress or artist’ [p. 292].) Crook (2012) studies Gothic elements in Valperga, where the castle becomes ‘not the labyrinthine abode of terror, but the site of wise female rule over a loyal feudal community’; Castruccio’s capture and destruction of the castle is ‘an act of aggravated quasi-rape’ and this ‘outrage offered to the madonna of the mountain releases her double, the witch of the forest’ Fior di Mandragola’ (pp.  116–17). Beatrice—‘Another double of Euthanasia’ (p. 117)—also has evident Gothic antecedents. Further reading: Bridgwater (2013); Clery (2000).

Greece The Greek Revolution or War of Independence from the Turkish Empire began in 1821. MWS keenly supported the Greek cause, which was focused for her by her friendships with ∗Mavrokordatos, ∗Byron and ∗Trelawny. The war features in ‘Euphrasia: a Tale of Greece’ and Falkner nearly dies fighting in it (NSW 7.54–65). It closely informs the Greek war imagined as continuing in The Last Man. MWS began learning classical Greek from PBS in September 1814 (MWSJ 27). (For the appeal of Greek for her as ‘forbidden knowledge’ at this point see Wallace [1997], p. 34.) She took up the language again in ∗Italy in July 1820 (MWSJ 325 and n.3; MWSL 1.155) and was given lessons by ∗Mavrokordatos from early 1821 (MWSJ 350) and by another teacher in March and April 1822 (MWSJ 400–8 and n.5). Greek ‘is a study which ever delights me—I do not feel the bore of it as in learning another language although it be so difficult—it so richly repays one’ (MWSJ 383–4). In October 1824, ∗Hogg having ‘insulted’ her Greek, she stressed to him that although ‘My defect of verbal memory will prevent my ever attaining proficiency in it’, she works at it ‘not for amusement but for the final improvement of my mind’ (MWSL 1.449).

  Guarini, Battista 

105

See also: ‘Cry of War to the Greeks’; ‘The Evil Eye’. Further reading: Beaton (2013).

Guarini, Battista (1538–1612) Author of Il Pastor Fido (1590). Its ‘chief charm … is derived from its poetry; the simplicity and clearness of its diction, the sweetness and tenderness of the sentiments, and the vivacity and passion that animate the whole’ (‘Guarini’ in Italian Lives, LL 1.188). Guarini himself ‘preferred the distinction of a court to poetic fame’ and was accordingly disappointed and mortified (LL 1.180). The main sources for ‘Guarini’ are Pierantonio Serassi’s life of ∗Tasso (1790) and Pierre-Louis Ginguené’s Histoire littéraire d’Italie (1811–1835) (LL 1.lii).

Guicciardini, Francesco (1483–1540) Florentine statesman and historian. For MWS in ‘Guicciardini’ (Italian Lives) his support for the Medici made him ‘the abettor of tyrants, the oppressor of his fellow citizens’ (LL 1.169). The language of his History of Italy is prolix, but his ‘animated descriptions of battles, the chances of war, and conduct of princes and leaders; his delineations of character, and masterly views of the course of events, all claim the highest admiration’; his account of the rise of papal power affords ‘convincing proofs of the pernicious effects resulting from the union of spiritual supremacy and temporal possessions’ (LL 1.171–2). The principal sources for the life are biographies by Domenic Maria Manni and Giovanni Rosini (LL 1.lii).

Guiccioli, Countess Teresa (1798–1873) ∗Byron’s lover from 1819. MWS met her in ∗Pisa on 1 September 1821 and described her to Maria ∗Gisborne in November as ‘a nice pretty girl, without pretensions, good-hearted and amiable’ (MWSL 1.209). In summer 1823 she attempted to mediate between MWS and Byron over payment for MWS’s return to England (MWSL 1.346 n.1; see MWSL 1.345–8). (Earlier,

106 G

in August 1822, she had suspected that Guiccioli was jealous of her intimacy with Byron [MWSL 1. 253].) From England she wrote to Guiccioli in Italian (with apologies for mistakes), trying to maintain a tone of high sympathy and emotion aimed partly at persuading her to supply material for ∗Moore’s Byron, partly perhaps to mask a sense of awkwardness in relations with her. The two women saw each other when Guiccioli visited England in 1832–1833 and 1835. During the later visit MWS worried that there would be ‘talk’ if she called on her in ∗Harrow (MWSL 2.246–7).

H

Hahn-Hahn, Countess Ida von (1805–1880) German novelist. In February 1844 MWS read ∗Hayward’s review of her work in The Edinburgh Review for January and commented that ‘I am always sorry when lady authors make their heroines so very sentimental, that they can only feel for themselves’ (MWSL 3.113). In summer 1845 she read some of Hahn-Hahn’s novels including, in two different translations, Countess Faustina (from Gräfin Faustine, 1840). In spite of some errors of management and feeling—a woman of the heroine’s ‘directness of feeling’ would not wish to leave her child—‘I like the book & it is clever’ (MWSL 3.192). The two novelists met when the Countess visited England in 1846–1847 (MWSL 3.113 n.4). At some time between 1844 and 1850 MWS worked on ‘Cecil’, an unfinished translation from Hahn-Hahn’s novel Cecil (1844). The ten-year-old Cecil comes to live with his uncle and English aunt at Elberfeld in the Rhineland; as the fragment ends, he has become a hard-working student at the University of Heidelberg. Sunstein 327 and LL 4.xlvi–viii (the piece was first published in LL 4.191–200) thought that MWS was the original author. The attribution is corrected by Crook (2003), who observes the presence of themes congenial to MWS—‘surrogate parenting, female education, maternal attachment’—and thinks it likely that her largely ‘faithful and even elegant’ translation was intended either for an article on HahnHahn or as a language exercise (p. 214).

© The Author(s) 2019 M. Garrett, The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Palgrave Literary Dictionaries, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56639-3_8

107

108 H

Hampden, John (1595–1643) Parliamentarian leader in the early stages of the Civil Wars, killed in battle in 1643. MWS, PBS and ∗Godwin visited his monument at Great Hampden in Buckinghamshire In October 1817 (MWSJ 181); Frankenstein and Clerval go to see it and ‘the field [Chalgrove, in Oxfordshire] on which that patriot fell’; briefly such sights elevate Frankenstein’s soul ‘from its debasing and miserable fears to contemplate the divine ideas of liberty and self-sacrifice’ (NSW 1.124). See also: The Lives of the Commonwealth Men.

Hare, Anne-Frances (1800–1864) Friend of MWS by 1830. She was Georgiana ∗Paul’s sister-in-law. From 1828, she was married to Francis Hare (1786–1842), ‘a celebrated wit and conversationalist’ (MWSJ 610). MWS found her ‘gentle & good’ and ‘her set very agreable [sic]’ (MWSJ 513): a ‘fashionable set,’ MWSJ 513 n.2 points out, which included the Pauls and ∗Manners-Suttons. The Hares were often resident in or travelling to Italy and France; MWS was with Anne-Frances in Paris in December 1843.

Harrow Percy Florence ∗Shelley was at Harrow School from 1832 to 1836. In 1833, to save money on fees, MWS moved to Harrow village and he became a ‘home boarder’. She found living there lonely and depressing, but felt that the school suited Percy admirably (MWSL 2.214–15). See also Eton College

‘Hate’ Work begun by MWS at Marsluys on 10 September 1814 and continued the following day (MWSJ 24). She may not have finished it and it is not, as far as is known, extant. It was probably a story but could have been a poem, an essay, or part of a more extended prose work.

  Hawthorne, Nathaniel 

109

Sunstein 87 suggests that ‘Hate’ could have presaged ‘what awaited her at home’. Other possible contexts are the strong feelings against her fellow travellers expressed in MWSJ 20 or an awareness—as in Frankenstein—of the societal factors which generate hatred or hatefulness.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804–1864) Novelist. Baldick studies his Frankenstein-like focus on ‘questions of society, science, and solitude’; removed from warm, often female society, the isolated man in stories including ‘The Artist of the Beautiful’ (1844) ‘hardens into a frozen or petrified monster’ (68).

Hayward, Abraham (1801–1884) Lawyer, society figure, and author. MWS, who knew him from the late 1830s, professed to be somewhat in awe at his reputation for culinary ‘connoisseurship’ (MWSL 2.333–4, 3.420). He sent her a copy of his 1833 translation of ∗Goethe’s Faust (MWSL 2.334, 3.420) and she quotes his Some Account of a Journey Across the Alps (1834) in Rambles (NSW 8.105–6).

Hays, Mary (1759–1843) Novelist, friend of ∗Wollstonecraft. Shelley (1998) explores connections between her The Victim of Prejudice (1799) and Valperga, including the ‘subversive fatality of a matrilineal tradition, in which the daughter of a fallen woman is adopted by a “father” [Beatrice and the Bishop in Valperga] who tries vainly to protect her from the taint of her past’ (p. 24).

Hazlitt, William (1778–1830) Critic and essayist. MWS had known him since childhood and attended at least one of his lectures on English philosophers (WGD 4 February 1812). In

110 H

February 1817 she was present at a long discussion ‘concerning monarchy and republicanism’ in which Hazlitt and PBS put the republican case and Leigh ∗Hunt the monarchist (MWSJ 163 and n.3). Soon afterwards she read Hazlitt’s and Hunt’s The Round Table: a Collection of Essays (1817) (MWSJ 165) and in 1825 was reading the essays which were republished as Notes of a Journey Through France and Italy (1826) (MWSL 1.477). She must also have known his The Spirit of the Age (1825; for possible references see NSW 4.128n. and LL 4.60n.) It includes character sketches of ∗Godwin, ∗Coleridge, ∗Byron, ∗Moore and Leigh Hunt. In 1836, she read William C. Hazlitt’s life of his father, included in his Literary Remains (1836) (MWSL 2.277). MWS was offended by Hazlitt’s largely hostile review of PBS 1824 in the Edinburgh Review in 1824 but was too shocked to be angry when she saw him ‘gau[nt] and thin’, a ruin of himself (MWSL 1.452).

‘The Heir of Mondolfo’ Tale first published in 1877 from a manuscript once apparently sent to Leigh ∗Hunt. Robinson argues for a date in the 1820s, partly on the grounds of unusual length compared with later pieces for the Annuals (CT 395). (‘The Brother and Sister’, however, is very nearly as long and was published in The Keepsake for MDCCCXXXIII.) MWS had visited the Greek temples at Paestum in southern Italy, one of the settings of the story, in February 1819 (MWSJ 249). In the period when the house of Anjou ruled ∗Naples (thirteenth to fifteenth century) Fernando, Prince Mondolfo, hates his second wife ‘as a hindrance of his ambitious views’ (308). Their son, Ludovico, who defends her, also earns his father’s hatred and, especially after the mother’s death, returns it. In his eighteenth year, while out hunting, he comes upon Viola, a beautiful peasant girl who is caring for an old, dying friend; Ludovico’s heart is softened and he becomes aware of his own solitude. Later, in response to a taunt about his ‘violet girl’ from his father, he realizes that he loves Viola—we know that she loves him—and secretly marries her. A few years later Fernando, having lost his elder son, decides that Ludovico must marry the noblewoman intended for his brother. Ludovico reveals that he is already married. Hiding his real intentions, his father asks him to conceal the fact for a time and, in Ludovico’s absence, confronts Viola. She rejects his scheme for her and her son to be pensioned off and disappear to Spain but is seized all the same and taken to the port of Salerno. She manages to escape and flees as far as the temples of Paestum, which ‘some god still seemed to deify … with his presence’ and fill with the spirit of beauty, moving her to an epiphany of awe, gratitude and joy (328). Meanwhile Ludovico, thinking that his father must have killed Viola, has decided to go and

  Hemans, Felicia 

111

die as a crusader. But on his way to sail from Brundisium (Brindisi) he meets Viola and their child in another numinous place—a natural fountain and contrastingly silent pool in a pine wood (330–1). They live happily and Fernando makes his peace with them, not least for practical reasons: he recovers his heir. Women here, as often in MWS’s fiction, bring out the good in men, moving them to love and compassion. Ludovico’s mother alone had ‘penetrated beneath the rough surface’ which hid his ‘sensitive heart’ (309), and with her loss he becomes more aggressive and revengeful; not until he meets Viola does he again feel sympathy and pity (313–14); even Fernando ‘did not repine that the violet girl should be the mother of the Heir of Mondolfo’ (331). (Smith [1996], p. 61, notes that ‘a feminine principle creates imaginary transformations … that critique a class-based system of patrilineage’.) Conceivably this influence would have been associated more explicitly, if the story had been revised for publication, with the benevolent power of nature experienced at Paestum and the pine wood and perhaps, earlier, in the lovers’ bower (317).

Hemans, Felicia (1793–1835) Poet. Kelly (1998) traces parallels and possible influences between Hemans’s and MWS’s work, particularly Tales and Historic Scenes (1819) and Valperga and The Forest Sanctuary (1825) and The Last Man; they share ‘themes, forms, and topical relevance for the struggles of European liberal and reform movements against reactionary and repressive post-Revolutionary and post-­Napoleonic regimes’ and use similar techniques ‘to feminize masculine history’ (p. 198).

History of a Six Weeks’ Tour Through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland, with Letters Descriptive of a Sail Round the Lake of Geneva, and of the Glaciers of Chamouni Travel narrative by MWS and PBS, published anonymously by Thomas Hookham and Charles and James Ollier on 6 November 1817. MWS ­probably began work on ‘History of a Six Weeks’ Tour’ in August 1817, was editing the letters by late September and fair-copied them in mid-October (NSW 8.1–2). She revised the work for PBS 1840 (Essays) (for details see NSW 8.5). A preface by PBS is followed by MWS’s ‘History’—her heavily revised version of the Journal account of 28 July–13 September 1814, which

112 H

includes some entries by PBS. Next come her Letters I and II, which describe briefly the journey to ∗Switzerland in 1816 and reflect on its landscape and inhabitants. (These letters were perhaps addressed, originally, to Fanny ∗Godwin—see MWSL 1.19n.— and/or adapted from the lost Journal entries for this period, as suggested by Bolton [2010], p. 11). The remainder of the volume consists of Letters III and IV, by PBS, and his poem ‘Mont Blanc’. Donald H. Reiman in SC 7.41 suggests that the volume as a whole is ‘carefully conceived to culminate in Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”’. Moskal (2003) argues further that ‘this constructed ascent’ uses traditional hierarchies both of genre—from diary to letters to poem—and of gender, where a man’s work supersedes a woman’s (p. 243). But this tradition ‘is counterbalanced by [the Shelleys’] acknowledgement of Mary Shelley as first author. Her journal, … which gives the whole volume its name, is the longest single item in the book’ (p. 244). The whole compilation, however, can be seen, as by Bolton (2010), as more fundamentally collaborative than such discussions allow. Both Shelleys seem to have been involved in editing the work (NSW 8.2, 4) and MWS has ‘often talked over the incidents that befell us’ (8.15), no doubt with PBS and CC among others. Dekker (2005) suggests that tourism itself was ‘inherently collaborative’ for the Shelleys (p. 205). An important source for the tone and focus of MWS’s contributions is ∗Wollstonecraft’s Letters, Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796), which PBS read aloud on the Rhine (NSW 8.34) and which provides a model of ‘topographical musings … on politics, society, aesthetics, and her own feeling’ (NSW I.xxv); for the relation between the two works see further Labbe (1992). Other travel works MWS read in summer 1817 included volumes of Edward Daniel Clarke’s Travels in Various Countries of Europe (1810–1823) (MWSJ 169, 177). References to ∗Rousseau suggest the author’s liberal sympathies and his Julie; ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) perhaps influences the Swiss settings. Another source is ∗Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III, especially its account of the Rhine (see NSW 8.13 and 36). For the role of ∗Cervantes see Moskal (2000). MWS’s contributions to HSWT follow a long established tradition in identifying and reflecting on national differences in manners, costume, transport and society: French costume and an ‘irresistibly ludicrous’ vehicle, for instance (NSW 8.16); French servants versus English (8.17); clean Switzerland versus dirty France (8.27); the ‘disgusting’ lower order of Germans and ‘a truly German beauty’ (8.36–7); Dutch’ inconveniences’ (8.38). (Such differences appear less important and extreme in the Geneva Letters than in ‘History’.) Less traditionally, these reflections, especially in ‘History’, appear to arise spontaneously as the travellers follow their ‘desultory visits’, drawing on an ‘imperfect journal’ and some letters to friends (Preface, 8.13). They try to

  History of a Six Weeks’ Tour Through a Part... 

113

walk as an ‘eccentric enough’ way of travelling which pleases them ‘from its romance’ (8.19). They improvise their journey as often as planning it, giving for Dekker (2005) an ‘impression of high-spirited kids playing an imperfectly understood game’ (p. 204). Bennett (1998) sees this improvisatory quality as an aspect of the unconventional journey of ‘women who travel on foot, looking for “delight and beauty” (8.13) rather than the customary tourist quest for art and culture found in major cities’ (pp. 26–7). For Jones (1997), p. 25, the work ‘revises androcentric imperatives for touring’. The ‘reformist commentary on politics and the devastation of war’ (Bennett [1998], p. 25) is fundamental to this unconventionality—to the break with the travel-observation genre, to the discussion of subjects regarded as unsuitable for women. The conquerors of France are condemned for their ‘Gothic barbarism’ in destroying ‘the monuments of their own defeat’ (8.18); scenes of devastation left by the invading Cossacks give ‘a sting to my detestation of war’ (8.21); anti-British feeling among the French is ‘encouraging to all those of every nation in Europe who have a fellow feeling with the oppressed, and who cherish an unconquerable hope that the cause of liberty must at length prevail’ (8.41–2); the ∗French Revolution, ‘notwithstanding the temporary bloodshed and injustice with which it was polluted, has produced enduring benefits to mankind’ (8.46). The radicalism of such remarks in ‘History’ is partly muted, however, by their context in a brisk narrative of the inconveniences and delights of travel. The reviewer in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine for April 1818 emphasizes the ‘amusement and interest’ and the pleasing simplicity of the account (p.  412), ignoring the occasional political comment and finding the stockings of the ‘Lady’ author ‘of the purest white, and much more becoming than the brightest blue’—probably an implied contrast with the France of the bluestocking Lady ∗Morgan (NSW 8.4). (Blackwood’s concentrates mainly on ‘History’, as do The Eclectic Review for May 1818 and a brief account in The Monthly Review for January 1819.) Some readers will have realized or suspected the identity of the authors. Strategies for minimizing the risk of scandal include PBS’s recasting of the elopement as a marital expedition (8.13). Blackwood’s (p. 412) likes the idea of a ‘sweet-blooded wedded wife’ travelling with her husband. The change of the ‘sister’ (CC) of the original preface to ‘friend’ (NSW 8.387) in the revision aims to make readers less likely to recall the old allegations of incest in the group—either Shelley or Byron cohabiting with a pair of sisters (see Polidori, John William; BLJ 6.76). David Booth, who knew the circumstances of the original pre-marital journeys, was duly scandalized (SC 7.44, 36n.) See also: Beckford, William

114 H

‘History of the Jews’ Untitled and unfinished manuscript work, probably written in about 1815 (see LL 4.lxxii–iv). It was first published, under this title, in Blumberg (1993), pp. 190–202. It aims to expose, in ‘Jacobin’ tradition, the ‘long maze of absurdities’ (LL 4.340) of the biblical account from the Creation to Samson. Improbabilities and inconsistencies are pointed out and there is a particular focus on cruelty, which Blumberg (1993) feels may indicate ‘growing unease about the violence inherent in radicalism’ (p. 19). The sources of the work are in the writings of ∗Paine, ∗Gibbon, ∗Volney, perhaps the rationalist preface to Alexander Geddes’s Bible translation of 1792 (Blumberg, pp.  22–4), and ∗Voltaire, especially La Bible enfin expliquée of 1776 (LL 4.lxxiii–iv). MWS is also reacting against the attack on ‘the abominations associated with non-Judaeo Christian religions’ in ∗Southey’s Thalaba (1801), Madoc (1805) and The Curse of Kehama (1810) (Blumberg 1993, p. 13; see MWSJ 26, 85, 90 and LL 4.345 note e). The attitude to religion is largely shared with that of PBS in ‘The Necessity of Atheism’ (1811) and Queen Mab. Possibly, ‘The History of the Jews’ is ‘a hybrid composition’ where MWS incorporates some PBS material ‘into a narrative to which both were contributing’ as in HSWT (LL 4.lxxvi). Blumberg (1993) feels that although MWS would probably have extended ‘her condemnation of the Jews to religion in general’, ‘As it stands, her argument is clouded because she gives her Biblical Jews contemporary racial stereotypical characteristics and her radicalism is undercut by her failure to establish the despotic tendencies in any monotheistic religion’ (p. 29).

Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus (1776–1822) German writer. There is no direct evidence that he and MWS knew each other’s work but Baldick finds parallels between his tales, especially Der Sandmann (1817) and Die Bergwerke zu Falun (1819), and Frankenstein. Like Frankenstein, Hoffmann’s protagonists are often ‘distracted from their fiancées by some delusion associated with their work or that of their masters’ (65). See also: ‘Mortal Immortal, The’

  Hogg, Thomas Jefferson 

115

Hogg, Thomas Jefferson (1792–1862) Lawyer and friend of PBS, with whose approval he was involved in a close relationship with MWS in early 1815. Hogg, it seems clear, expected them to have sex and she, partly on the grounds or excuse of her pregnancy, almost certainly refused. MWSJ 57–8 n.1 studies the evidence for the nature of their relationship, seeing the reciprocal ‘love’ MWS says she cannot yet feel for Hogg (MWSL 1.6) in the context of PBS’s ‘idea … of a community of like-­ minded persons living together in harmony’. (For further discussion, see Seymour 126–7 and Bieri [2008], pp. 305–9.) The early closeness no doubt resulted partly from MWS’s need for friendship and support in the period of estrangement from her family. But by March 1817 ‘I do not like [Hogg] and I think that he is more disagreable [sic] than ever’ (MWSL 1.35). In 1827, when she told ∗Trelawny about him as the man who had become Jane ∗Williams’s common-law husband, she gave a more favourable account: he has talent, wit and ‘sensibility, and even romance in his disposition, but his exterior is composed, and at a superficial glance, cold’; he is ‘liberal in opinions, constant in his attachments’ (MWSL 1.544–5). Probably this verdict was influenced by Williams’s opinion of Hogg and by the desire to reassure Trelawny and, as MWS mentions (MWSL 1.545), to discourage him from spreading scandal about the new relationship. She did not know how little, under Williams’s influence, Hogg reciprocated such good will (see MWSJ 502–3 n.2). She continued, on occasion, to seek Hogg’s legal and other advice: see for example MWSL 2.301, 3.286. Hogg (1858) was effectively suppressed, after publication of two of the intended four volumes, by Sir Percy and Lady ∗Shelley, because they disliked its often ironic tone and its not always laudatory account of PBS. The two extant volumes, for chronological reasons, have little to say about MWS. But Hogg does describe an early encounter of PBS and MWS (vol. 2, p. 538). In the oblique, digressive passage which follows, he pointedly fails to answer the question ‘Do you think he loved her?’, before claiming, eventually, that it was asked him not of the Shelleys but of ∗Godwin and ∗Wollstonecraft (vol. 2, p. 543). Such implied lack of certainty did not suit the image of the Shelleys’ perfect love insistently promoted by their son and daughter-in-law.

116 H

Holcroft, Louisa see Kenney, James and Louisa Holcroft, Thomas (1745–1809) Radical playwright and novelist, friend of ∗Godwin. MWS refers frequently to him in ‘Life of William Godwin’. Between 1815 and 1817 she read works by him including The Adventures of Hugh Trevor (1794–1797), Anna St. Ives: a Novel (1792) and Travels from Hamburg … to Paris (1804) (MWSJ 91, 170–1, 141). She quotes his ‘Song of Gaffer-Gray’ (a poem included in Hugh Trevor) in a letter of 1823 (MWSL 1.322–3). She describes Holcroft’s ‘upright, stern, and “knock-me-down” attitude and expression’ as sketched by Sir Thomas ∗Lawrence at the 1794 Treason Trials (NSW 2.248).

Homer Epic poet. By 1818 MWS was familiar with ∗Pope’s translations of Homer, probably both The Iliad and The Odyssey (MWSJ 224). She was reading the Greek original, starting with lines from The Odyssey, in summer and autumn 1820 and August 1821 (MWSJ 325, 339–40, 377). She continued in 1823 (see MWSJ 471 and n.1), feeling that ‘in the company of Homer I am with one of [PBS’s] best friends’ (MWSL 1.398).

Hopwood, Hannah (1793?–1826>) Early friend of MWS in London, a drawing teacher from a family of engravers (SC 3.104–5 and n.11). She accompanied her on her second visit to ∗Scotland in 1813.

Horne, Richard Henry (‘Hengist’) (1802–1884) Poet, journalist, and author of The New Spirit of the Age (1844), where the section on MWS notes that ‘The Monster in “Frankenstein” [is] sublime in his ugliness, his simplicity, his passions, his wrongs and his strength, physical and mental’. He ‘pleads the cause of all that class who have so strong a claim

  Hunt, (James Henry) Leigh 

117

on the help and sympathy of the world, yet find little else but disgust … or neglect’ (p.  227). Valperga is briefly considered for its morally instructive excitement of ‘reprobation and pity’ for the hero and the inclusion of ‘two female characters of wonderful power and beauty’ (p.  232). Horne told Elizabeth Barrett that he had ‘reason to think that Mrs Shelley [was] not displeased’ (Browning and Barrett Browning [1984-], vol. 9, p. 7).

Hunt, (James Henry) Leigh (1784–1859) Liberal journalist and poet, close friend of PBS. The Shelleys and Hunts lived together in Hampstead in February, and in ∗Marlow from April to July, 1817 and they saw much of each other in ∗London in February and March 1818. In June 1822 The Hunts arrived in ∗Italy, where Leigh Hunt worked on The Liberal, just before PBS’s death, and lived with MWS near Genoa in 1822–1823. Here MWS’s relationship with Hunt deteriorated. He was persuaded with difficulty to relinquish PBS’s heart to her (see MWSJ 444 n.2). He believed that she was cold and unfeeling and did not mourn PBS. This view resulted from her apparently calm outward demeanour, from something PBS said about her when he met Hunt for the last time, and particularly from Jane ∗Williams’s claim that MWS was responsible for her husband’s unhappiness. From a modern perspective, it seems surprising that Hunt did not perceive that her apparent coldness was a sign of the traumatic effect of the loss of her children and husband. In January 1821 she tells him, having read his ‘Deaths of Little Children’ in The Indicator, that it is apparent from ‘the ideal immortality’ imagined for them that he has lost no children himself (MWSL 1.170.) In June 1823 reconciliation was achieved; Hunt now realized that she did have strong feelings of ‘remorse’ and that he had too easily believed Williams’s reductive version of her (see MWSL 1.354 and Seymour 324, 597 n.48.) But the relationship often remained uneasy. As well as Hunt’s continuing belief that he was Shelley’s truest friend, his ongoing expectation that MWS would aid him financially, as PBS extensively had, contributed to tensions. (In 1823 Hunt, unknown to her, appropriated money intended by ∗Byron to pay for her journey to England.) She continued to supply the Hunts with money whenever possible; in 1847, refusing a request for more, she points out to him, perhaps with some exasperation, that ‘we [she and her son] have not the wealth of Croesus—alas!’ (MWSL 3.306). Her attitude to Hunt may be summed up in her remark to ∗Trelawny, in 1831, ‘He is the same as ever, a person whom all must love & regret’ (MWSL 2.133).

118 H

MWS mediated between Hunt and Byron in the affairs of The Liberal (for example MWSL 1.288–9). She read many of his poems and essays, quoting his best known poem, The Story of Rimini (1816), II.47, as part of Frankenstein’s characterization of Clerval (NSW 1.120), IV.28–31  in her ‘Life of Shelley’ (LL 4.225), and III.340–1, 345, 353 as an epigraph in Lodore (NSW 6.118). She copied Hunt’s ‘To T.L.H. [his son Thornton] During a late sickness’ into her Journal (MWSJ 160–1) and used his ‘Thou lofty mirror, Truth, let me be shown …’ (1823), translated from ∗Alfieri, in Italian Lives (LL 1.293). She detected bias against herself, worked to correct wrong biographical statements about PBS, and asked for discretion about CC’s past, in the essay later adapted by Hunt in Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries (1828) (MWSL 1.475–7), a book where she felt that Hunt was ‘slurring over the real truth’ (MWSL 2.94). She was at the opening of his play The Legend of Florence in February 1840 and went again in March (see MWSL 2.340, 341). In the 1840s, she went on reading and helping to promote his work. She included in Rambles (NSW 8.265–6) Hunt’s translation (original version 1808) of Catullus’s ‘Ad Sirmionem Peninsulam’, read his poetry anthologies Imagination and Fancy (1844) and Wit and Humour (1846) and his Men, Women and Books (1847), and responded warmly to Stories from the Italian Poets: with Lives of the Writers (1846) (MWSL 3.160–1, 300, 315, 273).

Hunt, Marianne (1788–1857) Artist—she painted, sculpted and cut silhouettes—married to Leigh ∗Hunt. Sunstein 134 suggests that ‘her strongest bond [with MWS] was a common sister problem’, with Marianne‘s sister, Elizabeth (Bessy) Kent occupying a similar position in the Hunts’ household to CC in the Shelleys’. Later relations between MWS and Hunt, who became an alcoholic, were sometimes strained: see MWSL 2.51 and notes 10 and 11.

I

Illustrations of Mary Shelley’s Work The first visual images of Frankenstein are a poster of ∗Cooke as a tall, athletic creature in ∗Presumption, and the frontispiece of Milner’s The Man and the Monster (1826) showing O. ∗Smith’s creature with long, curly black hair. Neither these pictures nor Theodor von Holst’s frontispiece for the 1831 edition of the novel suggest the brutish figure of later tradition. In Holst, says The London Literary Gazette for 19 November 1831, he is ‘more gigantic than frightful, and the face is deficient in that supernatural hideousness on which the author so especially dwells’ (p.  740). While the frontispiece contains skulls, a skeleton and a Gothic arch, Moreno and Moreno (2018) point out, its emphasis, like that of the novel, is on the ‘fact of the abandonment of the creature and its social costs, not the creation itself and its possible ethical consequences’. Frankenstein’s irresponsibility is established because, as Shelley (2012) notes, he both runs from his creature here, and parts from Elizabeth in Holst’s title-page illustration (p. 329). Clear sympathy for the creature is also shown in some of the many twentieth- and twenty-first-century illustrated editions. Lynd Ward’s expressionist woodcuts of 1934 show him as a strong figure ‘at one with the rugged natural world in which he manages to survive’ (Shelley [2012], p. 20). When Ward’s monster looks at his reflection in ‘a dark parody of Narcissus’ (Shelley [2012], p. 191), we see not ‘the ravaged outer mask Victor constructs and describes’ but one whose soul is innocent (Scott [2012], p. 218). The cover picture for Shelley (2018) also shows him looking at his reflection. By contrast, again,

© The Author(s) 2019 M. Garrett, The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Palgrave Literary Dictionaries, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56639-3_9

119

120 I

with the many ∗Karloff-inspired monsters or the brooding, ogreish figure from Odilon Redon’s L’Ange du destin on the cover of some imprints of Shelley (1994a), the signs of monstrosity are light—mainly a few cracks or scars on the face. But here, suggesting the problems of perception, they look rather worse in the reflected version. This creature, with fairly long black hair and reddish lips, seems more female or hermaphroditic than usual; we are encouraged to think of the exclusion from society of women as well as other ‘monsters’, and perhaps of the female creature in the novel. Among other interesting illustrations are Barry Moser’s (1984), where figures ‘strongly shaded, as emerging from darkness’, at once invite and repel the viewer’s approach (Moreno and Moreno [2018]). Elena Odriozola’s (2013) focus on the novel as ‘birth myth’ and include MWS’s lost baby, which grows into the creature ‘who embraces and consoles her’ (Moreno and Moreno [2018]). Nineteenth-century political cartoons interpret the creature, very differently, as a metaphor for the unleashing of dangerous forces. In 1832–3 several such images—perhaps inspired, directly or indirectly, by the 1831 edition— commented on the Great Reform Bill. For example ‘Frankenstein Creating Peers’ in McLean’s Monthly Sheet of Characters (1 March 1832) refers to the threat that ∗William IV would create enough Whig peers to force the bill through parliament. James Parry’s ‘Reform Bill’s First Step Amongst His Political Frankensteins’ followed in 1833. Four later cartoons from Punch (July-December 1843, 15 July 1854, 8 September 1866 and 20 May 1882) are reproduced in Baldick 100, 95, 85, 90: in Kenny Meadows’s ‘The Irish Frankenstein’ Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal Movement has unleashed a violent, fist- and cudgel-waving Irish giant; in ‘The Russian Frankenstein and his Monster’ Tsar Nicholas I flees the Allied response—a monster made of cannons—which he has stirred up in the Crimean War; in John Tenniel’s ‘The Brummagem Frankenstein’ the Birmingham Liberal MP John Bright will clearly not be able to control the working-class giant who looms above him; and in Tenniel’s ‘The Irish Frankenstein’ Charles Stewart Parnell is responsible for the part-animal monster which has committed the Phoenix Park murders in Dublin. Similarly in ∗America, in Frank Bellew’s ‘The Modern Frankenstein’ in the Lantern for January 1852 the abolitionist editor Horace Greeley has created a huge, uncontrollable black monster and in Henry Louis Stephens’s ‘The New Frankenstein’ in Vanity Fair for 10 May 1862 the Confederacy is under threat as another visibly black monster lifts President Jefferson Davis above his head (Young [2008], pp. 38–40, 47–8, 49). Cartoons of such ‘political Frankensteins’ and monsters have remained common. For another rich source of pictures, in comics and graphic novels, see Bukatman (2018) and Murray (2016).

  ‘Illyrian Poems—Feudal Scenes’ 

121

There are fewer visual responses to MWS’s other works, although the number is now increasing (especially online). Her tales, mainly for The ∗Keepsake, are accompanied by engravings; she incorporates scenarios from the pictures, or briefly describes the scene, rather than the artist providing illustrations for her work. The Folio Society edition of The Last Man (2012) reproduces paintings by Caspar David Friedrich; the familiar Wanderer Above the Sea of Mist (1818) is on the front cover. The covers of most other editions of the novels similarly use or adapt existing images. An earlier Last Man, Shelley (1994b), has a detail from Joseph Wright of Derby’s The Old Man and Death (1773), where a skeleton advances as a man attempts to back away, stretching a hand out in a clearly futile attempt to fend him off. The picture suggests the inexorable power of death in the novel and also, perhaps, attempts to trade on MWS’s reputation as a horror writer; it may be felt to narrow or distort the focus of the novel and was replaced, in later impressions, by the lone figure amid mountains of John Cooke’s Jungfrau. Shelley (2000) gives Valperga a detail from Mantegna’s fresco of Lodovico Gonzaga of Mantua and his family which appropriately suggests power and intrigue in an Italian city-state. Lodore (Shelley 1997a) adapts a photograph of about 1855 of a tall-hatted man sitting on an overhanging cliff by a rushing waterfall. Most editions of the more single-focus Mathilda feature pictures of young women in contemplation or distress.

‘Illyrian Poems—Feudal Scenes’ Anonymous review, in the Westminster Review for January 1829, of ∗Mérimée’s La Guzla, ou Choix de poésies illyriques … (1827) and La Jaquerie; Feudal Scenes; followed by the Family of Carvajal, a Drama (1828). The author’s earlier Le Théâtre de Clara Gazul (1825), purportedly translated from the Spanish, possessed ‘at once the faults and beauties of their models, full of spirit, originality, and fire’ (NSW 2.172). The poems in La Guzla, which are supposed to be translated from Illyrian originals, are ‘warlike, pathetic and amatory – and … characterized by the utmost simplicity’ (NSW 2.173). MWS provides extensive translations from the French. La Jaquerie lacks ‘one prominent character to concentrate the interest’ but gives ‘a forcible picture of … the crimes and misfortunes resulting from the feudal system’ (180). She carefully defends the author’s boldness in writing, in The Family of Carvajal, ‘a tremendous domestic tragedy, founded on the same story as the Cenci’ (180). See also: ‘The Evil Eye’.

122 I

India MWS knew something of India from her friends and acquaintances. She heard ∗Medwin reading from his Indian journal in 1820 (MWSJ 339 and n.3); Edward ∗Williams first met Medwin, and probably Jane ∗Williams (MWSJ 598), while serving in India; and ∗Peacock worked at the Examiner’s office of the East India Company in London from 1819. See Neff (1997) for a detailed discussion linking Frankenstein, ∗Southey’s Kehama and ∗Morgan’s The Missionary, with the fearful or ambivalent British colonial attitude to Anglo-Indian ‘half-castes’. Falkner mixes with ‘several natives’ and attempts to help and ‘inculcate European tastes and spirit, enlightened views, and liberal policy’ in a few native princes, while serving in India (NSW 7.171–2).

‘Inez de Medina’ Translation from an Italian manuscript novel by ∗Galloni. Only two chapters of the translation, and nothing of the original, survive. In the two chapters Inez de Medina is kidnapped, in Palma de Mallorca, by the villainous Don Juan de Rìbas, is rescued, loses her reason after hearing the (doubtless incorrect) news of the death of her fiancé in battle, and goes to Barcelona where her brother, Count Alonso, looks after her; he is in love with Don Juan’s sister, Dolores, who persuades Alonso that she is an innocent, wronged wife but is actually ‘the most finished coquette in Barcellona’ (LL 4.327). The story is set in or after the First Carlist War (1835–9) (see LL 4.lxix and 327 n.b). MWS began work before February 1850 (LL 4.lxvii). Galloni had sent her manuscripts of some of her work, including ‘Inez’, by June 1848, and MWS enquired about possible publication in London or Paris (LL 4.lxviii). A.A. Markley finds ‘the rapidity, ease and confidence of a practised translator working in a language that she has been intimate with for thirty years’ (LL 4.lxx).

Ingolstadt University in Bavaria where Frankenstein studies and constructs his creature. In 1814 MWS read, in ∗Barruel, about its society of the Illuminati, founded in 1776. The society ‘was pledged to spread revolutionary egalitarianism and

  ‘The Invisible Girl’ 

123

infidelity. Communicating with the dead was among its aims’ (NSW 1. 29 n.a). For further possible links with Frankenstein, see Sunstein 427 n.12.

‘The Invisible Girl’ Tale in The Keepsake for MDCCCXXXIII (November 1832). It is billed as ‘by the Author of Frankenstein’, as are the reprints in Match-Making, and Other Tales (Philadelphia, dated 1832) and The Keepsake: a Gift for the Holidays (New York, 1854). A traveller learns the story behind a picture labelled ‘The Invisible Girl’ which he sees in an apparently ruined tower near the coast of ∗Wales—the picture labelled ‘Rosina’ in The Keepsake engraving by J.C.  Edwards after William Boxall. Henry Vernon and Rosina grow up together and intend to marry, but the scheme is disapproved of by Henry’s father Sir Peter and aunt Mrs Bainbridge. Having sent the unsuspecting Henry away to travel, they attempt to force Rosina into another marriage. When she refuses, they virtually imprison her at the remote Vernon estate in Wales and, when Mrs Bainbridge intercepts a letter to Henry, they throw her out of the house. She disappears and is thought to have committed suicide. The grief-stricken Henry comes home and goes to Wales to try to find out more about her fate. During a storm, he and the men rowing his boat are guided to shelter by a light shining in the tower. One local theory is that the light is the work of ‘the ghost of a maiden who lost her sweetheart in these parts’ and is known as ‘the Invisible Girl’ (CT 194). But an evidently living girl has been glimpsed in the woods nearby, where Henry finds Rosina’s distinctively small and elegant ‘slipper’. He finds her in the tower—still ‘invisible’ because he cannot see her in the dark—and all is made right. Sir Peter, in spite of his outward cruelty, had truly loved the girl and now supports the marriage. The tale is full of stock fairy-tale elements. It is elicited from a garrulous old woman (CT 192), there is a wicked stepmother figure—here an aunt—in Mrs Bainbridge, who is much more to blame than Sir Peter and is excluded from the final reconciliation, and a slipper plays a part in the hero’s identifying the heroine. Smith (1996) suggests that ‘In its alternating appeal to and satire of fictional conventions, this story resembles Jane ∗Austen’s anti-Gothic novel Northanger Abbey’ (p. 68). The mysterious girl turns out, not to the reader’s surprise, to be Rosina. Once she has recovered from illness, she becomes again like the person in the picture ‘drawn of her in her days of bliss’, a copy of which now hangs in ‘the tower, the scene of her suffering’ (201)—neatly

124 I

returning the reader to the setting and to the description and reproduction of the picture at the beginning. Sussman (2003) looks at Rosina’s ‘physical ability once again to match the unchanging beauty of the picture’ as ‘an unusual instance among Shelley’s stories in which femininity is recuperable and can regain its lost value’ (p. 171).

Ireland Ireland is a setting in Frankenstein (NSW 1.133–41) and Perkin Warbeck (NSW 5.114–27, 278–90). In The Last Man ‘disorganized multitudes’ of Irish invade England but are dissuaded from the fight and resettled by Adrian (NSW 4.230–6). For MWS’s comments on the Irish famine of 1846–7 and its political consequences see MWSL 3.308.

Irving, Washington (1783–1859) American writer who lived in Europe, mainly in London, from 1815 to 1832. MWS first met him in 1824 (see MWSL 1.505 and 507 n.6). She expressed particular enthusiasm for his ‘exquisitely written and interesting’ Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1829), floated the idea of reviewing it for The Westminster Review in January 1830, and praised and drew on it in Perkin Warbeck (MWSL 2.91, 99, NSW 5.85 n.). ∗Payne showed Irving her letters and unsuccessfully attempted match-­ making between them: see MWSL 1.493 n.2 and Sanborn (1907).

Italian Lives MWS worked on the first of the two Italian volumes of Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain and Portugal between late autumn 1833 and summer 1834 or later (LL 1.xxxviii) and on the second probably between late 1834 and mid-1835. They were published by Longman and John Taylor on 1 February and 1 October 1835. Subjects covered by MWS range chronologically from ∗Petrarch and ∗Boccaccio to ∗Monti and ∗Foscolo. (Sir David Brewster wrote the section on Galileo and Sir James Montgomery those on ∗Dante, ∗Ariosto and ∗Tasso.) The main sources include Girolamo Tiraboschi’s Storia della l­ etteratura

 Italy 

125

italiana (1795) and Pierre-Louis Ginguené’s Histoire littéraire d’Italie (1811–1835) (see further LL 1.xlii–iii). One of the subjects most often discussed is the opposition between the original and the derivative or mechanical. Petrarch and Boccaccio, for instance, write well in the vernacular, much less well in the Latin they mistakenly espouse. ∗Goldoni replaces the ‘violent and forced situations’ conventional in commedia dell’arte with ‘natural incident’ (LL 1.248). Smith (1996), p. 133, notes that ‘her extensive knowledge of contemporary Italy lends a note of authority’ to the second volume. Her interest in Italian literature is politically informed, but ‘partly because living writers were not included’, her Risorgimento sympathies remain ‘obscured’ (LL 1.xlvii). Reviews were somewhat mixed. In volume one, the style either is ‘pleasing and easy’ (The Sunday Times, 8 February 1835, p. 1) or ‘wants simplicity’ (The Athenaeum, 28 February 1835, p.  168). The Spectator (7 February 1835) thinks it a worthy effort but poorly organized (pp.  138–9), The Monthly Review (March 1835) finds it ‘mechanical’, a mere ‘heap of dates, events, anecdotes, and extracts’ (pp. 299–300), but ∗Hunt in Leigh Hunt’s London Journal (25 March 1835) is impressed by the ‘judicious’ account of the friendship of Petrarch and Boccaccio (p. 96). Having summarized the lives of Alfieri, Monti and Foscolo The Monthly Review (November 1835) salutes the ‘full, but concise, perspicuous’ and enthusiastic volume two (p. 332). The Spectator (31 October 1835) thinks the material ‘richer’ than for volume one, especially in the lives of Goldoni and ∗Alfieri ‘from their having been chiefly drawn from autobiographical sources’, but finds the same mixture of ‘judgment’ and ‘feebleness’; ‘the compiler appears to be translating from different authors, and to be altogether dependent on his originals for manner as well as matter … This close adherence to the manner of the originals has, however,’ the advantage of giving ‘an accurate picture of Italian life for the last two centuries’ (p. 1945). Further reading: Guerra (2005). See also: Poe, Edgar Allan.

Italy MWS lived and travelled widely in Italy in 1818–1823, 1840, 1842–1843 and, more briefly, 1850. It became, perhaps particularly after she left in 1823, very important to her sense of personal identity and loyalty to the past and her dead husband and children. In 1824 she says that ‘the blue skies and verdure clad earth of that dear land is [sic] necessary to my existence’ and ‘to be away

126 I

from Italy, is to lose you [PBS] twice’ (MWSJ 477); ‘Beloved Italy, You are my country my hope - my haven!’ (MWSJ 486). In 1826, pretending to be Italian with Jane ∗Williams gave her the social freedom, not available to an English lady, to watch opera from the pit without an attendant male ‘shadow’ (MWSL 1. 519). When at last she returned in 1840, Italy again strongly signified escape from English dullness, weather, restrictions and loneliness: see MWSJ 565–73. The visits of 1840 and 1842–1843 were longed for and therapeutic, but also painful: see Rambles, NSW 8.107. Schoina (2009) examines how MWS in her writing about Italy ‘very early claimed—and earned—an authoritative voice on things Italian’, employing ‘Italy and Italianness in the construction of a new personality, a new cultural model with which she identifies’ (p. 63). She speaks out, with the authority of an Anglo-Italian, ‘in defence of active Italian genius and the fitness of the Italian people for independence’ (Crook [2001], p.  75). In the preface to Rambles, she defends Italians against their critics, seeking support for the desire for unity and freedom from foreign power (NSW 8.65–70). On the decline and recovery of Italian national feeling, see also ‘Alfieri’ (LL 1.254–6). MWS had a particular love of Italian. ∗Hogg, in 1815, was possibly her first teacher (see MWSL 1.9). In Milan in April 1818, she had at least one lesson with an ‘Italian Master’ (MWSJ 207) and mentions ‘Italian exercises’ several times over the next month (MWSJ 207, 210–11). She again took Italian lessons, and regularly translated from the language, in ∗Pisa in March and April 1822 (MWSJ 403–8). Schoina (2009), who discusses MWS’s Italian letter to Leigh ∗Hunt (MWSL 1.162–4), notes the status of Italian at this time as ‘an acceptably “feminine” language’; for many women writers ‘the use of an alternative language signifies the emergence of a new self ’ (p. 80). On her return to England, the language also became part of her perception of Italy as her lost paradise. Her knowledge of Italian was essential to Italian Lives. In ‘Monti’ (LL 1.318–22), she surveys Italian dialects and the dispute about whether Tuscan should be allowed pre-eminence. And she retained a useful facility in the spoken language (Rambles, NSW 8.104). For Italian translations of Frankenstein from 1944 to 2000, see Shelley (2009). Translations of other works include Mathilda (1980), L’ultimo uomo, from The Last Man (1997), Storia di un viaggio in sei settimane: 1817 (1999), Valperga (2007) and Il segreto di Falkner (2017). See also: Florence, Livorno, Lucca, Naples, Rome, Venice. Further reading: Bandiera and Saglia (2005); Burwick and Douglass (2011); Marino (2011); Palacio.

J

Jacobean Drama see Renaissance Drama Jameson, Anna Brownell (1794–1860) Novelist and writer on art, travel, and literature. MWS reviewed two of her books—see The Loves of the Poets and, for Diary of an Ennuyée, ‘The English in Italy’—in the 1820s and met her in April 1841 (MWSL 3.12, 15). Jameson’s Sketches of Germany (1834) is one of the sources of Rambles (NSW 8.51 and 55 n.17).

Japan The first Japanese translation of Frankenstein, by Masaki Yamamoto, was published in New York in 1934. Shelley (2009) lists some later versions. The novel is popular as a source for graphic books and is the loose inspiration for the television series Frankenstein’s Love (Furankenshutain no Koi), written by Sumio Omori and directed by Shunsuke Kariyama and others (2017).

© The Author(s) 2019 M. Garrett, The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Palgrave Literary Dictionaries, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56639-3_10

127

128 J

Jewsbury, Maria Jane (1800–1833) Poet and reviewer. She met MWS in June 1830 and told Anna ∗Jameson of her impression of ‘a matured child; a union of buoyancy and depth’. Jewsbury was puzzled by her ‘hilarity, contrasted with the almost sadly profound nature of some of her remarks … I doubt her being a happy woman, and I also doubt her being one that could be distinctly termed melancholy’. She is ‘the kind of woman for [her father, mother and husband] to love to describe’ (letter of 18 June 1830, quoted in MWSL 2.112). Jewsbury’s sister, the future novelist Geraldine Jewsbury (1812–1880), may also have been present: see MWSL 2.112 and 113 n.3.

Johnson, Samuel (1709–1784) Author and lexicographer. MWS notes reading Rasselas (1759) in 1814 and 1817 (MWSJ 27, 177) and The Rambler (1750–1752) in 1816 and 1817 (MWSJ 136, 154, 166). She read James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) in 1820 (MWSJ 318–19) and called it, in 1835, ‘the most amusing book in the world’, which she has read ‘I am sure ten times’; she loves ‘the kind hearted wise & Gentle Bear’ Johnson, ‘as loveable a friend as a profound philosopher’ (MWSL 2.223). See also: Literary Lives.

‘Journal of a Tour in Italy, and also in a part of France and Switzerland’ Review of a book by James Cobbett (1830) in The Westminster Review for January 1831. Crook (2009) presents conclusive evidence that MWS wrote the review (pp.  39–43). She criticizes Cobbett for the superficiality of his treatment of Italian agriculture art, government, manners and literature and, with reference to the Jews of Rome, the anti-Semitism shared with the author’s father, William ∗Cobbett (Crook [2009], pp.  46, 49–50). ‘He is a good-­ humoured and intelligent traveller—but neither inquisitive nor critical’ (p. 46).

 Journals 

129

Journals MWS’s journals survive for 28 July 1814 to 13 May 1815 and most of the period between 21 July 1816 and 2 October 1844. (In addition to the absence of material for 1815–1816, thirty-nine leaves have been torn out: see MWSJ xix.) The first journal, kept initially by PBS as well as MWS, records their elopement journey. (He also contributed some material later, mainly in 1816.) More often the early journals note the Shelleys’ reading, usually without further comment. As the daughter of her parents ‘she must very early have realized that no written document could ever be considered entirely private’ (MWSJ xv–xvi) and from 1816 the entries become noticeably more circumspect, omitting, for instance, all mention of CC’s involvement with ∗Byron and the birth of their child (MWSJ xvii). After PBS’s death, by contrast, there are frequent passages of searching self-analysis. (In earlier years too there are such occasional personal, reflective entries as MWSJ 171–2, 395–6 and 399–400.) For journal material which MWS used, or adapted, for publication—mainly in HSWT and ‘On Ghosts’—see MWSJ xxv. MWS sometimes discusses the rationale of keeping a diary. Having written ‘to discharge into it the overflowings of a mind too full of the bitterest waters of life’, she decides on 19 March 1823 to ‘put down some of my milder reveries’ (MWSJ 459–60). Often in the mid-1820s, however, ‘I am urged to recur to the relief of this book from the extreme melancholy that oppresses me’ (474). ‘It has struck me,’ in December 1834, ‘what a very imperfect picture … these querulous pages afford of me—This arises from their being the record of my feelings, & not of my imagination’. Her imagination, which she goes on to celebrate, ‘finds other vents’ (MWSJ 542–3). Further reading: Corbett (1993); Crook (2004).

K

Karloff, Boris (1887–1969) Stage name, from 1911, of William Henry Pratt. He provided the best known image of Frankenstein’s monster in Whale’s film Frankenstein (1931), a non-speaking role. On the first frontal view ‘The liminal state of death coming into life is evoked by the Creature’s stiff gait and expressionless eyes underneath half-closed lids … but emotion is soon apparent’ (Shelley [2012], p. 121). In The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) Karloff’s monster does speak, if ‘only in rough halting measures’ (Shelley [2012], p. 121). He repeated the role in Son of Frankenstein (1939) and is the mad doctor in House of Frankenstein (1944). He plays, in Frankenstein 1970 (1958), both a descendant of Frankenstein who re-creates his experiments and, more briefly, the recreated creature.

Kean, Edmund (1787–1833) Tragic actor. MWS saw him at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in parts including Hamlet (1814), Shylock (1817 and 1824), Richard III (1824) and Othello (1825); she probably saw him again as Othello in 1828 at Covent Garden (MWSL 2.64). She ‘never was more powerfully affected by any representation than by his Sir Giles Overreach’ [in Massinger’s A New Way to Pay

© The Author(s) 2019 M. Garrett, The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Palgrave Literary Dictionaries, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56639-3_11

131

132 K

Old Debts] at Drury Lane in 1824 (MWSL 1.416). Watching Kean, when she first came back to England from ∗Italy, she was ‘in a fit of enthusiasm—and wished much to write for the stage’ (MWSL 2.246; see also 1.412).

Keats, John (1795–1821) Poet. MWS met him through Leigh ∗Hunt in ∗London in February 1817. She read Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems (1820) in October 1820 (MWSJ 335–6). She quotes from ‘Sleep and Poetry’ (1817) in The Last Man (NSW 4.214). ‘Oh! For a draught of that Lethean wave’ in ‘Stanzas’ (‘I must forget thy dark eyes’ love-fraught gaze’) echoes Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, lines 4, 11 and 15 (LL 4.139 n.b). In the 1831 Frankenstein the creature’s words to the sleeping Justine—‘Awake, fairest, thy lover is near—he who would give his life but to obtain one look of affection …’ (NSW 1.216) echo ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, line 276 (Heffernan [2006], p. 182). See also: ‘The Dream’.

The Keepsake Annual, published between 1827 and 1856 (dated 1828 to 1857). It sold well, predominantly to middle class female readers; its engravings, often the starting or reference point for the stories and poems, ‘on an unprecedented scale, allowed ordinary people to own high quality reproductions of significant works of art’ (Paula R. Feldman in Reynolds [2006], p. 7). While ‘Politics, current events, outwardly radical social opinions, and crude language were unacceptable in The Keepsake’, its poems and stories nevertheless often suggest serious questions about the position of women in society (Hoagwood and Ledbetter [1998], p.  10). Contributors apart from MWS include ∗Scott, ∗Southey, ∗Wordsworth, ∗Coleridge, ∗Hemans, ∗Landon (LEL) and ∗Moore. MWS’s stories in The Keepsake (1829–1839) are ‘The Sisters of Albano’, ‘Ferdinando Eboli: a Tale’, ‘The Mourner’, ‘The Evil Eye’, ‘The False Rhyme’, ‘Transformation’, ‘The Swiss Peasant’, ‘The Dream’, ‘The Brother and Sister’, ‘The Invisible Girl’, ‘The Mortal Immortal’, ‘The Trial of Love’, ‘The Parvenue’ and ‘Euphrasia’. Nora Crook (cited by Markley in LL 4.lxxii) judges that the stories ‘The Silver Lady’ (in The Keepsake for 1838) and ‘The Ghost of the Private Theatricals’ (for 1844, by ‘M.S.’) are not hers: they are influenced,

  Kemble, Frances (Fanny) 

133

rather, by Frankenstein. (See further Crook [2018].) For the editions of 1831 and 1839, she also contributed poems: ‘Absence’, ‘A Dirge’, ‘A Night Scene’, ‘Stanzas, “How like a star …”’, ‘Stanzas, “O, come to me in dreams …”’. The poems ‘To a Lady Singing’ (1831) and ‘Au Revoir’ and ‘It is because amid the Crowd’ (1833) are possibly also by MWS (LL 4.lxxii). Further reading: Harris (2015).

Kemble, Frances (Fanny) (1809–1893) Actor, well known from 1829, whom MWS had seen on stage by 1832 and first met probably in summer 1837 (MWSL 2.287 and n.1). They knew each other again after Kemble’s return from America in 1840. (She married Pierce Butler in Philadelphia in 1834 but was in England for much of the 1840s; they divorced in 1848.) MWS also knew her sister, the singer Adelaide Kemble Sartoris (1815–1879) (MWSL 3.15, 137).

Kenney, James and Louisa Friends of MWS. James (1780–1849) was a playwright, married to Louisa (1786–1853), whose first husband was Thomas ∗Holcroft. MWS greatly enjoyed their company when she visited them at Versailles in August 1823 and stayed in contact with the family; her ‘favourite’ (MWSJ 611; see also MWSL 1.373, 375) was Louisa’s daughter, Louisa Holcroft (born 1801).

Knox, Alexander (1818–1891) University friend of Sir Percy Florence ∗Shelley who travelled with him and MWS in Germany and Italy in 1842–1843. He worked with the French authorities against ∗Gatteschi on her behalf in 1845. MWS quotes from his Giotto and Francesca and Other Poems (1842) in Rambles (NSW 8.200). His marriage to Clara Clairmont (1826–1855), daughter of Charles ∗Clairmont, in 1849, resulted in CC’s final breaking off relations with MWS.

L

L a Rochefoucauld see Rochefoucauld, François, Duc de La. ‘La Vida es sueño’ Poem beginning ‘The tide of Time was at my feet’ and extant in two different versions. The first, headed ‘Stanzas’, dated 26 July 1833 and first published in 1969, uses sea and beach imagery to suggest a loss of hope; the speaker is left sadly pacing ‘the barren sand’. The second, dated 1834 and first published in 1953, adopts the title of ∗Calderón’s play and adds two further stanzas, one figuring ‘a dream of joy’ and the other suggesting its fleeting nature. The imagery is common in the poems mourning PBS but the ‘sudden shock’ which the piece seems to record is probably the ending of MWS’s relationship with Aubrey ∗Beauclerk in summer 1833 (LL 4.xxxvi).

Lackington, George (1777–1844) Publisher of the 1818 edition of Frankenstein. He was the senior partner in Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, and Jones (until 1817 Lackington, Allen and Company). The firm’s extensive list included history, ghost stories and volumes on alchemy and the occult, among them Sarah Utterson’s Tales of the Dead (1813), translated from ∗Fantasmagoriana. © The Author(s) 2019 M. Garrett, The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Palgrave Literary Dictionaries, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56639-3_12

135

136 L

‘Lacy de Vere’ see p. xiv. Lamartine, Alphonse de (1790–1869) Poet and politician. MWS possibly met him in Paris in 1840 (MWSL 3.333 n.2). In a note to ‘Racine’ in French Lives MWS salutes Lamartine for overcoming the difficulties inherent in writing French verse. ‘Some of the earlier poems, in particular … make you forget that you are reading French—you are only aware of the perfection of his musical pauses, the expressive sweetness of his language, and feel how entirely his mind can subdue all things to its own nature’ (LL 3.174).

Lamb, Charles (1775–1834) Essayist, poet, and children’s author. He was a close friend of ∗Godwin, whom he first met in 1800, and knew MWS from early childhood; Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespear (1807) was published by M.J. Godwin and Co. She read Charles’s Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of Shakespeare (1808) in 1817 and 1820 (MWSJ 183, 184, 334). His Elia essays (1820–1823) rank among ‘works where the individual feeling of the author embues the whole subject with a peculiar hue’ (NSW 2.131) and Rosamund Gray (1798) is ‘the most perfect specimen’ of artless simplicity (NSW 2.203 and note). She saw the Lambs in ∗London in 1817 and fairly often after her return to England in 1823. Lamb, according to Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd, thought Frankenstein ‘the most extraordinary realisation of the idea of a being out of nature which had ever been affected’ (The Letters of Charles Lamb: With a Sketch of his Life, 2 vols [1837], vol. 2, p. 332). Lamb wrote for her, and sent her, three unpublished songs in 1833 or 1834 (see Bennett [2002]).

Lamb, Mary (1764–1847) Children’s author. She was the main writer, with her brother Charles ∗Lamb as co-author, of three works published in the Juvenile Library of M.J. Godwin and Co.: Tales of Shakespear (1807), Mrs Leicester’s School (1809) and Poetry for  Children (1809). MWS often saw Mary Lamb—to whom she wrote in

  Landon, Letitia Elizabeth (‘L.E.L.’) 

137

1827 that ‘I love you with all my heart’ (MWSL 1.555)—with her brother. In ‘Molière’ (French Lives) she refers to her poem ‘Helen’ (LL 3.108).

Landon, Letitia Elizabeth (‘L.E.L.’) (1802–1838) Poet and novelist. MWS found the third volume of her novel Romance and Reality (1831) ‘very good indeed. It is Romance & Sentiment; which is that in which she excells [sic]  – Reality she has too much fancy & feeling for’ (MWSL 2.151). In ‘Camoens’ MWS quotes Landon’s Ethel Churchill (1837), chapter 16, on the sufferings and rewards of the poet’s life (LL 2.289–90n.). Landon’s play Castruccio Castrucani [sic]; or, the Triumph of Lucca (published in 1841  in Life and Literary Remains of L.E.L., edited by Laman Blanchard) is loosely related to Valperga, drawing on some common sources and with a similar interest in women and power: see further Crisafulli (2008).

Languages MWS was especially fluent, after 1818, in Italian (see Italy). She also had a good knowledge of Latin, which she seems first to have worked at seriously in 1815 (see MWSJ 73 and PBSL 1.432) and a fairly good understanding of Greek (see Greece). She must have learned French as a girl; she was less fluent in the spoken language than CC, who went abroad with her in 1814 partly as interpreter, but was clearly able to hold her own in French literary company in 1828 (see Paris) and had excellent reading ability. She was reading some Spanish in December 1819 (MWSL 1.120) and more by November 1820 (MWSJ 340–1, 347). She professed difficulty, among the main western European languages, only with German (see Germany). Literary Lives required proficiency in French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. MWS works from or translates the original language wherever possible. She sees her parallel passages of original and translation as encouraging study of works ‘in their native language’ (LL 1.xxx; see also LL 2.85). She was interested in the distinctive sound and expressive quality of languages— for Italian see, for example, MWSJ 476, for Spanish LL 2.27 and for Portuguese LL 2.254–5—and in debates about the best form, especially for literary purposes, of the language: in Italy Tuscan and the questione della lingua, in Spain ‘the old Castilian style’ (LL 2.99) versus the way in which Renaissance writers’

138 L

adoption of Italian metres ‘informed the Spanish language with powers unknown to former poets’ (2.92).

Lardner, Rev Dr Dionysius (1793–1859) Popular scientific lecturer and writer. He came to England from Dublin to become Professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy at the London University (1827–1831). He edited the Cabinet Cyclopaedia (133 volumes, 1830–1844) whose contributors included, as well as MWS (see Literary Lives), Lardner himself, ∗Scott, ∗Moore, ∗Southey and Rev. John Stevens Henslow. Each volume cost six shillings; the intended readership was the expanding middle class, including women, and ‘the aspiring skilled artisan class’ (see LL 1.xix–x). Lardner was much engaged in ∗London social life until scandal—his elopement with the wife of a Dragoons officer—forced him to live in France and America from 1840. MWS had met him by May 1835 (see MWSJ 612).

The Last Man Novel which ‘secularizes apocalypse’ (Page [2012b], p. 1179); ‘an adult fairy-­ story of death by plague, graphic battle-scenes, and impassioned love’ (Betty T. Bennett in NSW 1.li). It was written between summer 1824 and, probably, February 1825, with additions possibly up to autumn 1825; publication by ∗Colburn as the work of ‘the Author of Frankenstein’, was on 23 or 24 January 1826 (NSW 4.xi-xii, xv n.11). Colburn paid £300 for the copyright (MWSL 1.505). A second edition followed later in the year, Galignani brought out an edition in Paris in March 1826 and Carey, Lea and Blanchard one in Philadelphia in 1833 (NSW 4.xi). In the Introduction, an unnamed figure explains how she and her since-­ dead companion discovered, in the Cave of the Cumaean Sibyl, prophecies written on leaves and bark. The speaker has edited the prophecies into Lionel Verney’s first-person narrative of future events. Lionel has strong feelings against the former royal family—England became a republic in 2073— because his father, having been a favourite, was rejected by the King. The son of this last King, Adrian, Earl of ∗Windsor, nevertheless succeeds in befriending Lionel and educating him away from the wild, lawless life he has been leading. Adrian is a convinced republican while his mother, the Countess of

  The Last Man 

139

Windsor, is ambitious for the family to recover the throne. Adrian falls in love with Evadne, a Greek princess, but she loves Lord Raymond, an ambitious soldier and politician. Raymond, however, marries Perdita, Lionel’s sister. Lionel and Idris, Adrian’s sister, love each other and they marry after she escapes her mother’s plan to kidnap her and force her into a marriage more likely to help regain the throne. Raymond is elected Lord Protector. He re-­ encounters and helps Evadne, now living in poverty, and their relationship leads to his separation from Perdita, resignation as Lord Protector, and return to the war between ∗Greece and Turkey. When he disappears Perdita, who still loves him, travels to Greece with Lionel. They find that Raymond has been captured by the Turks. Eventually he is released, comes back to Athens, and, with Lionel, re-joins the fight. Lionel comes upon Evadne, disguised as a soldier (for love of Raymond) and dying, wounded and delirious, her corpse a ‘monument of human passion and human misery’ (NSW 4.145). She prophesies Raymond’s death; entering Constantinople, he is killed in an explosion. Perdita refuses to leave his tomb. Lionel drugs her and they sail for home, but she drowns herself. Plague, first reported in Constantinople, spreads gradually until it reaches England. Ryland, the new Lord Protector, a proponent of social reform, panics in the face of the disease and Adrian is elected as Lord Deputy, proving a much greater practical success than expected, though he cannot halt the contagion. Idris dies while on a mission of compassion; Lionel places her body in the chapel at Windsor, where he and her mother the Countess are at last reconciled. The decreasing number of survivors leave England in search of a cooler climate. In Paris, there are dissensions between different groups, one led by a dangerous false prophet—opposed by Adrian and Lionel—who is eventually exposed and kills himself. Those still alive journey on to ∗Switzerland, their numbers further diminished on the way. The plague ends, leaving alive only Adrian, Lionel, Clara (daughter of Perdita and Raymond), and Lionel’s son Evelyn, who move on to ∗Italy. Evelyn dies of fever, Clara and Adrian are drowned attempting to sail to Greece, and Lionel is left as the sole survivor. He goes to ∗Rome and decides to write his history and then to sail on, driven by the faint hope of finding another human and, more, by ‘restless despair and fierce desire of change’ (NSW 4.365).

Sources The most obvious biographical sources are the strong elements of PBS in Adrian and ∗Byron in Raymond. MWS told ∗Bowring that in The Last Man

140 L

she ‘endeavoured, but how inadequately to give an idea of ’ PBS, whose ‘being was [not] regulated by the same laws that govern the existence of us common mortals’ (MWSL 1.512). He is an enthusiastic idealist, ‘deep read and embued with the spirit of high philosophy’; ‘his slight frame was overinformed by the soul that dwelt within: he was all mind’ (NSW 4.24). Like PBS, he espouses utopias (NSW 4.187) and drowns at sea. Raymond inspires much interest in women, goes abroad when his marriage fails, emulates ∗Napoleon and fulfils for a time Byron’s ambition for military and public greatness, is a hero in Greece and dies there; like Byron, he vacillates between confident self-­ promotion and melancholic self-awareness. Lionel, as their interpreter and survivor, occupies a similar position to MWS. Imagination has the power to soften the frame narrator’s ‘real sorrows and endless regrets, by clothing these fictitious ones in that ideality, which takes the mortal sting from pain’ (NSW 4.9); the writing of the novel can be viewed as a therapeutic process, a work of mourning or grieving, ‘some kind of Freudian talking cure’ (Melville [2007], p.  842), or ‘a conclusion to the series of fictional texts [especially Mathilda] that debate the function of literature in allaying grief and death’ (Carlson [2007], p. 192). For Idris as Jane Williams see Redford (2013). But the resemblances remain partial—‘faint portraits’ (MWSL 1.564)— and the judgements on real people and their ideas are open to different interpretations. For instance Bennett (1995) argues that ‘Mary Shelley abrogates the ideal of the etherealized poet, the figure often identified as Shelley but obviously not the involved political poet-philosopher she knew but rather only one aspect of Shelley, the Alastor figure he himself rejected’ (p. 148). And in working out variations on, and mourning, the two poets and her younger self, she registers the loss not simply of individuals but of a group, a shared culture. As she subjects their ideals to scrutiny she in effect continues the debates at ∗Villa Diodati or in PBS’s ‘Julian and Maddalo’. Among many other points of contact, Ryland resembles ∗Cobbett and the ex-queen perhaps Sir Timothy ∗Shelley or Mary Jane ∗Godwin, seen by MWS as obstructive, proud and vindictive members of the older generation. (But as Bennett [1995] points out, she also ‘bears more than a passing resemblance to wicked witches in any number of fairy-stories’ [p. 148].) Perdita’s coldness to Raymond followed by renewed love and self-castigation follows a similar pattern to MWS’s, but the character has no simple equivalence with her or with CC. She is called Perdita perhaps because she drowns herself ‘in ironical contrast to her Shakespearean namesake, who is “lost” by being abandoned on the sea-coast but then found as part of the regenerative denouement of The Winter’s Tale’ (Shelley [1994b], p. xi). Evadne is the major character who corresponds least evidently to a real contemporary. Her name comes

  The Last Man 

141

probably from the character in Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy (c. 1609), thus encoding qualities of ‘destructiveness, deception, and devotion’ (Shelley [1996], p. xxiv). Wang (2011), adding that the name also occurs in Richard Lalor Sheil’s Evadne, or the Statue (1819), notes that ‘Shelley’s Evadne departs significantly from both her dramatic forbears because of her uniquely subversive claim of authority and her rational, Wollstonecraftian mind’; ‘she offers Evadne as the androgynous alternative that Frankenstein lacked’ (pp. 239–40). For Evadne as ‘a female version of the Byronic hero’ see Lokke (2003b), pp. 120–1. The plague has sources in three texts acknowledged by MWS at NSW 4.203 and 209: ∗Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1772) and ∗Boccaccio’s Decameron. The story of the ‘self-erected prophet’ (NSW 4.292) draws on John Wilson’s City of the Plague (1816) (Shelley [1994b], p. 477). Other likely influences include the plagues of Exodus and Revelation and (NSW 4.xv n.14) Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, II.lxix, and ∗Lucretius’ De rerum natura, VI.1100–1286. MWS was also, no doubt, aware of reports of the cholera which had been spreading steadily from the east since 1817; see Bewell (1999) for the wider context of ‘the new biomedical environments brought into being by colonialism’ (p. 3)—the movement of disease between colonies and colonizer ending the possibility of a world with apparently safe boundaries. Bailes (2015) looks at the contemporary geological sources for the idea of extinction through plague. The idea of the Last Man had figured in The Last Man: or Omegarus and Syderia (1806), translated from Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s Le Dernier homme (1805), Byron’s ‘Darkness’ (1816) and Thomas Campbell’s ‘The Last Man’ (1823). A mythic model for ‘a world which seems to be destroyed and is not’ is supplied by PBS’s ‘The Sensitive-Plant’ (NSW 1.li; see further Bennett [1995], pp. 150–1). NSW 4.xiii notes that MWS’s ‘reading of ∗Plato, ∗Burke [whose Reflections on the Revolution in France is quoted at NSW 4. 126, 176, 180 and 319], William Cobbett … and ∗Godwin provided the framework for the novel’s political dialectic’. Stafford (1994) sees the novel as responding, in the same vein as Godwin’s Of Population (1820), to Thomas Robert Malthus: ‘her portrayal of the steady destruction of mankind, whereby every human life is of supreme value, is an angry retort to the theory that could consider men and women in terms of statistics and mathematical progression’ (p. 218). (For a full discussion of points of agreement and disagreement with Malthus, see Cameron [2012].) The Sibyl’s cave derives from ∗Virgil’s Aeneid, Book VI, and from the Shelleys’ and CC’s visit to the Grotto of the Cumaean Sibyl by Lake Avernus

142 L

in December 1818 (see NSW 4.5 note d). Stafford (1994) points to the eschatological associations of the Sibylline prophecies and to the relevance of Aeneas’ descent into the Underworld at Cumae ‘to be faced with not only visions’ of the future ‘but also his own lost loves’. While mediating the future, the preface also ‘invites the reader to share a journey to the realms of the dead and witness a heroic struggle to embrace new life as a result of confronting the past’ (p. 223). The Sibyl herself is relevant to the idea of lastness; like Lionel she lives on beyond her contemporaries until eventually all that remains is her voice (see Ovid, Metamorphoses XIV)—or in Lionel’s case his narrative. Ruppert (2009) argues that ‘By transferring vatic authority from the patriarchal Judeo Christian scriptures to the matriarchal sibylline leaves, Shelley meaningfully questions the masculine bias in Romantic prophecy’ (p. 146). Allen (2008) notes that PBS’s The Triumph of Life and The Last Man both present their ‘vision of malign Necessity on the basis of a proleptic vision’ (p. 110).

Themes and Interpretations The Last Man can be read as a pessimistic, even a nihilistic work. Monarchists, republicans, religious leaders, all perish, making it, for Sterrenburg (1979), ‘an apolitical novel’ (p.  328). Adrian’s millenarian, Godwin and PBS-inspired vision may seem as much of a dream as Ryland mockingly suggests (NSW 4.173)—and Ryland’s own reformist programme, like his personal courage, fails miserably when confronted with plague (NSW 4.185–6, 190–1). Against her ‘rational-humanist’ education, says Spark (2014), MWS pits the negative ‘argument of vanitas vanitatum without its religious corollary’ (p. 150). The imagination, exalted by Romanticism, is here, argues Paley, ‘merely a creator of deceptive fantasies’ (Shelley [1994b], p. xi). He cites, for instance, the purely momentary ability of ‘the creative power of the imagination’ to soothe Lionel with ‘sublime fictions’, as he searches for Raymond amid the ruins of the Golden City (NSW 4.159). Common explanations of such apparent negativity are MWS’s sense, in May 1824, that she is ‘the last relic of a beloved race, my companions, extinct before me’ (MWSJ 477) and the extinguishing of revolutionary hopes after 1815. For Sterrenburg (1979) The Last Man provides ‘an obituary on the idea that the social organism has a natural imperative toward survival and improvement’ (p. 332); MWS takes the disease metaphors used by earlier writers ‘as hopeful symbols of the revolutionary process’ and reinterprets them ‘in a pessimistic and apocalyptic way and, in so doing, rejects the meliorative political

  The Last Man 

143

views of her parents’ generation’ (p. 328). Bennett, however, provides some cogent arguments against such pessimism and rejection: England’s ‘form of isolationist republicanism’ in the novel fails in the absence of ‘the system of universal education advocated by’ PBS, Godwin and Wollstonecraft; in keeping with their political beliefs the author seeks to dismantle ‘expected values – genuine love of wife and children, traditional religion and traditional government – in order to compel readers to reconsider and reconstruct those values – to, by analogy, meditate a world view that above all else permits possibility’ (NSW 1.l). Allen (2008) finds in the novel a ‘reversibility’, a ‘divided vision, at once celebratory and mournful’, embodying ‘Shelley’s wholly consistent admiration for and yet “realist” critique of the Enlightenment “idealism” of her father and husband’ (pp. 112–13). The sibylline prophecy—its leaves disordered, provisional, subject to rearrangement—can be seen as a warning rather than a prediction: ‘one possible future’, contemplation of which may move the ‘audience to rethink human community against the image of its discontinuation’ (Ruppert [2009], p. 149). The figuring of the future which PBS and Byron might have had contributes to such contemplation: Adrian putting theory into practice when he shames and persuades both the Irish insurgents and his own army to stop the bloodshed, his ‘very excess of sensibility’ making him ‘more capable of fulfilling his station of pilot in storm-tossed England’ (NSW 4.236); Raymond the lover and war-hero reaping little fulfilment for himself and disaster for others. The preventative function becomes the more likely when the plague is interpreted as a metaphor. Lokke (2003b) argues that it manifests forces already apparent in the characters – the metaphorical sickness that infects Raymond and then Perdita (p.  121), the shattering of the characters’ happiness by Raymond’s wars and his affair with Evadne (p. 118). Destructive too are the limitations imposed on women (p. 127), shown, for example, in Lionel’s realization that he was wrong to withdraw Idris from her public role (NSW 4.249) and Perdita’s ‘Would that I also had a career …’ (NSW 4.126). Inequalities between men and women are among the social factors which culturally determine psychic conflicts and MWS’s ‘sibylline invocation of the vortex created by the human passion for power … becomes the voice of a Cassandra that we ignore at our peril’ (Lokke [2003b], p. 133). The artificiality of restrictions imposed by gender is reinforced by the traditionally female sensitivity of Adrian and Lionel, Evadne’s ‘decision and firmness’ (NSW 4.114), the Countess of Windsor’s heartlessly ‘unfeminine’ nature, and the series of ‘young women heroically undaunted in the face of deprivation and death’ (NSW 1.xlix). Fisch (1993) believes that the novel attacks all male leaders (p. 273) while Bennett (1995) suggests, rather, that it

144 L

‘attacks all conventional stratifications, civic as well as individual’ (p. 149); on gender in the novel see further Bannerjee (2010). Other themes include mortality and impermanence; ‘the failure of lofty ambitions’ (Sterrenburg [1979], p. 338); the way plague ‘brings out the best and the worst in human nature’ (Paley in Shelley [1994b], pp. xiii–iv) and political systems; biopoliticization through contagion (see Chatterjee [2014]). The absurdity of classism is shown particularly by the Countess—part of ‘The fatal disease’ which ‘is not so much the plague as misplaced pride’ (Williams [2000], p.  112). The difficulty of controlling the self is figured especially in Evadne and Raymond. Another concern is the wrongs of western imperialism, as in Adrian’s awareness, amid the bloodshed, that Turks are as human as Greeks and that ‘They were men and women, the sufferers, before they were Mahometans’ (NSW 4.125–6). The final position of Lionel as the Last Man is not completely desolate. Led on by ‘Neither hope nor joy’ but by desire for change, he will not simply give up. He will ‘round another and another promontory’, will, in spite of all the evidence against such meanings he has seen, ‘read fair augury in the rainbow – menace in the cloud – some record or lesson dear to my heart in everything’ (NSW 4.365). Like Ulysses in ∗Dante’s Inferno XXVI he may sail (NSW 4.364) beyond the Pillars of Hercules—the Straits of Gibraltar—adventuring in search of new knowledge. The echo of Dante at once endorses the sublime spirit of adventure and perhaps suggests, in the fate of Ulysses and his companions overwhelmed by a whirlpool, its possible hopelessness. Bennett argues that the closing pages affirm the power of the imagination (NSW 1.li–ii). For some Lionel’s very survival gives a positive message. Mellor (2002) sees his infection with plague by the embrace of a ‘a negro half clad’ (NSW 4.263), and his subsequent recovery, as suggesting that ‘if human beings were forced to embrace the racial Other … then they might escape the final destruction threatened by both the biological and the sociological plague in Shelley’s novel’ (p. 144). For Melville (2007) Lionel’s recovery indicates his ability to incorporate despair as ‘a kind of antibody that allows him to live with and confront the devastation and loneliness of his tragic fate’ (p. 841). Bennett traces through the novel ‘the gradual, Job-like education of [his] imagination … from aggressive narcissism to a transforming human understanding, which enlarges the imagination beyond ordinary limitations and opens new possibilities both to its readers and its author’ (NSW 1.xlix). James Arnett’s film Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (2008) is loosely inspired by the novel. Lionel Verney, a hospital worker immune to the disease, guns down fellow survivors who turn to cannibalism. In more academic contexts, the plague and attitudes to it have been read in terms of AIDS in the late twentieth century: see Fisch (1993).

  Lastri, Marco 

145

Reviews Many reviewers were suspicious of the novel’s subject, its setting in the future and its republican politics: ‘Mary Shelley, true to the genius of her family … once more ventures to create a world of her own, to people it with beings modelled by her own hand, and to govern it by laws drawn from the visionary theories which she has been so long taught to admire as the perfection of wisdom’ (The Monthly Review for March 1826, p. 333). (The more positive La Belle Assemblée for April 1826 thinks The Last Man ‘well calculated to rank with’ Frankenstein [p. 176].) The story was judged preposterous, laboured or polluted. For The London Magazine (March 1826) it is ‘an elaborate piece of gloomy folly’ (p. 422). The Literary Gazette (18 February 1826) finds after the first volume ‘a sickening repetition of horrors’, is facetious about female authors, wonders why, if balloon travel is possible, characters spend so much time travelling by more traditional methods, and rates the book as ‘an instance of the strange misapplication of considerable talent’ (pp. 102–3). The Panoramic Miscellany (March 1826) dismisses the style as ‘ornament, ornament, ornament, glittering conceit and spangled metaphor, heaped together without order, till meaning is lost in the glare of affected brilliancy’ (p. 384). Further reading: Albright (2009).

Lastri, Marco (1731–1811) Lastri’s L’Osservatore Fiorentino (third ed, 1821)—‘a history of the principal buildings of Florence  – with many curious anecdotes … about that City’ (MWSL 1.539)—is a source of Valperga. MWS read L’Osservatore in April 1821 (MWSJ 360–2) and sent Leigh ∗Hunt an extract, ‘Duello Formale di due de’ Fiorentini’ for possible inclusion in his (by then defunct) Indicator. In a letter probably written in January 1827 (MWSL 1.539 and 540 n.1) she proposes translating a ‘judicious abridgement’ of the work for publication by ∗Colburn.

Lawrence, James (1773–1840) Author of The Empire of the Nairs (1811, revised from his German version of 1801), a utopian work which MWS read in 1814 (MWSJ 29). Neff (1996)

146 L

sees Frankenstein as a parodic response to its ‘rash … scheme for scientific and social progress that banished fatherhood and paternal responsibility from family relationships’ (pp.  205–6). MWS may have been reminded, Neff believes, of ∗Godwin and PBS, utopians ‘who were often less than ideal as husbands and fathers’ (p. 206).

Lawrence, Sir Thomas (1769–1830) Portraitist. He had known ∗Godwin since before MWS’s birth; in ‘Memoirs of William Godwin’ she describes Lawrence’s ‘spirited sketch’ in which ‘the bending, meditative figure of Godwin’ contrasts ‘most happily with the upright, stern, and “knock-me-down” attitude and expression of his friend’ Thomas ∗Holcroft at the Treason Trials of 1794. She records a visit to his studio, where ∗Moore was sitting for him, in October 1829 (MWSJ 511). In Rambles she notes a discussion with Lawrence, perhaps on that occasion, in which he criticized her preference for line and expression over colour; ‘I am not sure that he is right’ (NSW 8.190–1).

Lawrence, (Sir) William (1783–1867) Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons from 1815, author of An Introduction to the Comparative Anatomy and Physiology (1816). MWS first knew him as a member of ∗Godwin’s circle (WGD 1 June 1812, 5 March 1813). He became PBS’s personal physician in 1815 and in the 1830s MWS was still consulting him about her son Percy Florence ∗Shelley’s health (MWSL 2.11, 210). See Cooper (2008), pp. 92–6, for Lawrence’s interest in the monstrous and MWS’s possible ambivalent response. Butler in Shelley (1994a), details the conflict between Lawrenc’s materialism and John Abernethy’s ‘spiritualized vitalism’ (p. xx) as a context for the discussions on the nature of life at ∗Villa Diodati in summer 1816. Butler argues that while the construction of the creature in Frankenstein reflects Lawrence’s materialism, the idea that ‘life’ can be added is in line with Abernethy’s beliefs. Hostile reviews, suspension by the Royal College and a judgement by the Lord Chancellor relating to blasphemy subsequently forced Lawrence to repudiate his Lectures on Physiology, Zoology and the Natural

  León, [Fray] Luis de 

147

History of Man (1819); Butler argues that this kind of response was a factor in MWS’s revision of the novel in a less sceptical and materialist direction in 1831 (pp. lvii–li).

León, [Fray] Luis de (1527–1591) Spanish religious poet. ‘Luis de Leon’ in Spanish Lives celebrates his pious life and ‘unornamented’ style (LL 2.85). He was imprisoned for some years by the Inquisition: ‘Sad as it is to reflect on an age and country in which virtues so exemplary, and talents so exalted, met with unmerited persecution, we are almost glad to find that one of the pillars of the very institutions that exercised such barbarous sway, was visited by its cruelty and injustice, to prove that no obedience and no excellence could shelter even the submissive slaves of despotism from its tyranny’ (2.84).

Letters, Mary Shelley’s Letters are extant from 1814 to 1851. MWSL has been supplemented by Bennett (1997b), Bennett (2001), Crook (2013), Joukovsky (2001), and Scott (2005). Their movement between the personal, the professional and the political is explored by Bennett (2003). Topics range from politics to gossip; tone from the passionate note of sincerity, honour and reasoned anger in her letter to Isabella Hoppner refuting the claim that Elena Adelaide Shelley was the child of PBS and CC (MWSL 1.205–8), to focused clarity as she argues against CC taking precipitate action to rescue Allegra (1.225–6), to whimsical humour intended to appeal to the Hunts as she journeys back from Italy (1.350–3), to, by her own account, open-hearted confession to ∗Gatteschi, confiding ‘details of my past history, which it wd destroy me for ever if they saw light’ (3.206). On 28 December 1825 she told ∗Payne ‘I think the best part of a letter often consists of what one says - after one has nothing more to say – when excuses – replications & intelligence is exhausted & you fairly chat as you would over the fireside’ (MWSL i.508–9). Epistolary form is used in HSWT, Frankenstein, and parts of Mathilda and The Last Man—where the Sibyl’s leaves are ‘prophetic … messages from the past to the present and the future’ (Bennett [2003], p. 218) – and Rambles.

148 L

Lewis, Matthew Gregory (1775–1818) ∗Gothic novelist and playwright. MWS read The Monk in 1814 (MWSJ 28) and ‘Lewis’s tales’ in 1815 (MWSJ 92), referring probably to his Tales of Wonder (1801). (Tales of Terror [1801] is not, as was later supposed, by Lewis.) He came to ∗Villa Diodati in August 1816 but MWS did not meet him. PBS did, and reported four ghost stories Lewis told him in MWSJ 126–9. MWS used the fourth story in ‘On Ghosts’ and published slightly revised versions of all of them in PBS 1840 (Essays).

The Liberal. Verse and Prose from the South Periodical in four numbers, published in 1822–1823, in which MWS published ‘A Tale of the Passions’, ‘Giovanni Villani’ and ‘Madame d’Houtetot’ as well as several pieces by PBS. ∗Byron, ∗Hunt and ∗Hazlitt also contributed.

‘Life of Shelley’ Fragmentary life of PBS, composed early in 1823 (see BSM 22 Part 2.38 and LL 4.lv); fragments are dated 10 February, 2 March and 25 March. MWS describes aspects of his life at ∗Eton, his interest in the supernatural and electrical experiments, the pernicious nature of the fagging system and PBS’s rightful opposition to control, his benevolence. She attacks schoolmasters as ridiculous figures who make their slaves cower rather than forming and educating them through ‘the resistless power of superior wisdom’ (LL 4.224). PBS’s works will establish him as ‘the wonder & glory of future ages’ but MWS alone can record his private life. Her own situation can seem desolate but she girds herself with the knowledge that she was ‘the chosen mate of a celestial spirit … I am to justify His ways; I am to make him beloved to all posterity’ (LL 4.226). MWS abandoned the work presumably at first from pressure of other projects (LL 4.lv) and then because of Sir Timothy ∗Shelley’s prohibition, in the wake of PBS 1824, of her writing his son’s biography. Her memoirs of the life feature instead in the notes to PBS 1839.

  ‘Life of William Godwin’ 

149

‘Life of William Godwin’ Manuscript draft for ∗Godwin’s life and letters. MWS worked on the project in 1836–1837 and again in 1840 (LL 4.xiii–xvii). Her aim was, as Clemit puts it, ‘to create a memoir that would both honour her father’s career as a writer devoted to public welfare and establish him as a model for others’ (LL 4.xiii). Much of the material consists of documents left by Godwin himself, but the ‘Life’ is ‘a hybrid work, somewhere between an edition and a biography or memoir’ (Allen [2000], pp. 224–5). MWS shapes it to emphasize her father’s political moderation (see for instance LL 4.48–9), to highlight the sympathetic personal qualities which explain his influence, to show ‘his intervention in the 1794 treason trials [LL 4.87–93] … as an act based not merely on political principle, but also on personal loyalty to his arrested radical friends’, and to defend his early attitude to marriage (LL 4.xvi). She both celebrates the flawless logic and ‘intellectual fire’ of his Political Justice and avoids endorsing its more radical conclusions by putting it in historical and personal context— ‘this is the age of facts & practicalities – that was the period of theory and enthusiasm’ and he went on to moderate many of his views (LL 4.59–61). The proceeds of the ‘Life’ were meant to go to Mary Jane ∗Godwin (LL 4.xiii, xiv), who died in 1841. As late as October 1845 (MWSL 3.241) MWS was still expressing the intention of one day completing the work. But she already seems effectively to have abandoned it, partly as a result of involvement in other projects but mainly, no doubt, out of caution about its effect on her and her son’s reputation. Allen (2000) suggests that for the period after the late 1790s, ‘the subject matter began to draw far too close to home for her to continue’—it would have meant ‘dragging herself and her own difficult and at times publicly infamous life into the story’ (p. 226). Allen goes on to trace a wider conflict between the daughter’s ‘abhorrence of the making public of private utterances and a contrary, Godwinian notion of history and biography’ (p. 227). She may have feared that her ‘Life’ would be received in the same way as Godwin’s own Memoir of Wollstonecraft, which ‘sent her name into a public sphere only for that name to become separated from any relation to its bodily referent’ (p. 231).

Lind, Dr James (1736–1812) Physician and scientist who taught and befriended PBS at ∗Eton. Waldman in Frankenstein combines aspects of Lind and Adam Walker (1731–1821) in

150 L

an ‘idealized version of [P.B.] Shelley’s education’ (Crook and Guiton [1986], p. 22). Goulding (2002) collects references to Lind’s electrical experiments— similar to ∗Galvani’s—with frogs.

Literary Lives Biographies published in ∗Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia: Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain and Portugal (1835–1837) and Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of France (1838–1839). These works were anonymous but MWS was named in some advertisements (see LL 1.xxv). She was the author of all the lives with the exception of those of ∗Dante, ∗Ariosto, and ∗Tasso (by Sir James Montgomery); Galileo (by Sir David Brewster); and Ercilla, Rabelais, and La Fontaine. Each volume cost six shillings. MWS received about £140 to £200 per volume (see LL 1.xxiv, xxx–viii and n.5, 2.xxxv n.24, 2.lviii n.14). Short literary biography was ‘inseparably associated’ with Samuel ∗Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets (1779–1781) (LL 1.xxvii). Also influential was ∗Godwin’s ‘uniting of biography, moral suasion and political and social history’ (LL 1.xxviii; see further Palacio 493–8); in Literary Lives, as in works like Godwin’s life of ∗Chaucer, a central theme is ‘the connection between the personal and the political and, more generally, the private and public life of her subjects’ (North [2009], p. 110). MWS is also ‘Wollstonecraftian in the recurrence of the figures of obscured women’ (LL 1.xxviii). Kucich (2000) examines how, in line with such works as Mary ∗Hays’s Female Biography (1803), she attends to the social and domestic relations of the ‘life of the heart’ (p.  206). In the Lives, Kucich argues, she takes the opportunity to expose ‘unjust gender systems’ and to distinguish between masculine Romantic egotism and the ‘outward extension of emotional sympathies’ (p. 210)—∗Rousseau’s [or ∗Foscolo’s] inward love of self ’ as opposed to ∗Petrarch’s ‘outgoing concern for Laura’s welfare’ (pp. 210–12). Other concerns include writers’ good and ill fortune and their response to it—‘the polarities of free will/determination and resignation/resistance’ (LL 1.xxxi)—an emphasis perhaps influenced by ∗Plutarch. Another theme is biography itself: see for example LL 1.226; 2.179, 265. The lives are intended to be accessible and instructive, half-way, for Palacio 499, between ‘la dissertation érudite et l’oeuvre de pure vulgarization’. MWS found the research and writing therapeutic after the collapse of her intended marriage to Aubrey ∗Beauclerk. She embarked on the project hoping to ‘find

  ‘The Lives of the Commonwealth Men’ 

151

lessons … to teach & tranquillize my disturbed and sorrowing mind’ (MWSJ 533) and she later felt that the work had saved her ‘life & reason’ (MWSJ 543). Further reading: Carlson (2007).

‘The Lives of the Commonwealth Men’ Book proposed by ∗Godwin about ‘our calumniated Republicans’ (PBSL 2.21). In June 1818 Godwin suggested that MWS might be interested in writing it and in July PBS told him that it was ‘precisely the subject for Mary’ except that in ∗Italy she would probably not be able to obtain the relevant books (PBSL 2.21 and n.1). ∗Hampden would no doubt have figured significantly in the work. Godwin’s History of the Commonwealth of England. From its Commencement, to the Restoration of Charles II was published in 1824–1828.

Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of France see Literary Lives and French Lives Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain, and Portugal see Literary Lives, Italian Lives, and Spanish Lives Livorno City in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. The Shelleys first visited in May to June 1818 and returned briefly in June 1819 before moving to Montenero, nearby, until the end of the summer. They lived at the ∗Gisbornes’ house in Livorno, in their absence in England, in summer 1820. In July 1822 MWS and Jane ∗Williams came, seeking news of their missing husbands.

Lochhead, Liz (born 1947) Poet and playwright. In her play Blood and Ice (1982, revised 1984; published 1985 and 1988) ‘blood stands for the reality of the body and of female sexuality … against the brittle, icy splendour of [MWS’s] husband’s theories about universal love’; for Lochhead her alleged coldness is ‘the outcome of a self-repressing attitude taken up in submission to the charismatic figures of

152 L

mother, father, lover’ (Poggi [2001], pp.  277, 278). Her poem ‘Dreaming Frankenstein’ (1984) explores some of the same themes. Further reading: Kabitoglou (2000).

Lodore Novel in three volumes ‘By the author of “Frankenstein”’, published by ∗Bentley in March 1835. MWS worked on it between 1831 and 1833 and again in spring 1834, when part of the manuscript was lost by the printers and she was forced to rewrite it. Henry Fitzhenry, Lord Lodore, marries a much younger woman, Cornelia Santerre, following his return home after years abroad. The marriage proves unhappy from its early stages because Cornelia’s mother, Lady Santerre, comes between them. Lodore becomes jealous when Cornelia flirts with a young Pole, Count Casimir Lyzinski. Lodore strikes him but refuses to fight a duel—he knows, unlike the young man himself, that he is his illegitimate son—and decides to leave for ∗America. His wife refuses to accompany him but he takes with him their infant daughter, Ethel. They settle in Illinois. When Ethel is fifteen and has been subject to some unwanted male attention, Lodore decides to return to England. But when he reaches New  York, he is killed in a duel with an American who witnessed, and deridingly tells the tale of, Lodore’s conduct towards Lyzinski and seemingly dishonourable flight. Ethel sails to England with Fanny Derham, the scholarly, high-thinking and independent-­minded daughter of an old friend of her father, and goes to live with her aunt, Elizabeth Fitzhenry. Ethel and Edward Villiers, whom she first met in New York, fall in love and marry. They travel to Italy to see Villiers’ friend Horatio Saville and his Italian wife, Clorinda. Saville was in love with Lady Lodore; she returned his love but the relationship faltered in the face of her apparent coldness. When the Villierses come home, they face financial problems (the result of Villiers’ father’s improvidence) and Edward Villiers is ­eventually arrested for debt, his wife insisting on sharing his confinement. Before this they have encountered Lady Lodore but she seems to feel little for her daughter; Villiers and aunt Elizabeth, who idolized her brother Lodore, are strongly biased against Lady Lodore, and separation between mother and daughter is further encouraged by the terms of the will Lodore drew up long before his death (NSW 6.96). But after Fanny Derham tells her about Ethel’s situation and she witnesses it for herself, the mother secretly arranges to give up her own wealth and social position in order to rescue the young couple. In the denouement of the novel, Lady Lodore is

  Lodore 

153

reunited with her daughter and marries Saville, the tempestuous Clorinda having died.

Title and Sources Lodore is the name of a waterfall near Derwentwater. It has no direct connection with the novel but may apply to the turbulent nature of the character, like Niagara Falls, ‘whose everlasting and impetuous flow mirrored the dauntless but rash energy of his own soul’ (NSW 6.81). ∗Hunt similarly links Lodore Falls and the character in Leigh Hunt’s London Journal for 6 May 1835, p. 138, and Shelley (1997a) cites examples of the ‘Miltonic awe’ the falls inspired in the Lake Poets and PBS and which is ‘meant to be evocative of the Byronic character of Fitzhenry’ (p. 22). The title remains appropriate after his death because of the novel’s concern with ‘the lasting effects of people’s actions’ (Shelley [1997a], p. 23). Examples of Lodore’s effect on the remainder of the novel are his abandonment of Cornelia, the ‘sexual’ (NSW 6.218) or strongly genderbased way he educates Ethel, her continuing devotion to his memory, and the terms of his will. There are also long-term consequences of the unhelpful education Lady Santerre gives Cornelia, the contrasting principles Francis Derham instils in Fanny, and Villiers’ father’s gambling. At the end of his life, Lodore is blind to ‘the truth … that the consequences of our actions never die’ (NSW 6.87). Sources include The Tempest: Prospero and Miranda on the island, Lodore and Ethel in Illinois, a parallel made explicit at NSW 6.14 (the epigraph), 28–9 and 87. (Such separation from mother and society binds father and daughter, for Joffe [2007a], ‘in an emotionally incestuous manner’ [p. 131].) Prospero, like Lodore and like Frankenstein, endeavours to form or shape another being: Lodore sought ‘to mould [Ethel] to the sweetest gentleness’ (NSW 6.18). (Ellis [1993], p. 230, characterizes Lodore as ‘Frankenstein without the science’.) The American setting is probably influenced by such works as Morris Birkbeck’s Notes on a Journey in America (1817) and Letters from Illinois (1818) and ∗Cobbett’s A Year’s Residence in the United States of America (1818): see Shelley (1997a), pp.  27–8. Vargo also cites the likely effect of conversation and correspondence with Fanny ∗Wright and Robert Dale ∗Owen; Lodore’s experience in Illinois may reflect the failure of their utopian colonies ‘no matter how idyllic the wilderness’ (Shelley [1997a], p. 28). (Sites [2003], however, sees Lodore’s ‘willingness to reject utopian domesticity [in Illinois]’ as resulting ‘in his re-entry into society, where, foregoing his responsibilities to his daughter in favour of worldly opinion,’ he is soon killed [pp. 187–8].) Stafford (2000) points out that the apparent democratic paradise includes ‘Duels, that sad relic of feudal barbarism’ (NSW 6.90) and suggests that MWS’s mixed feelings about America may reflect her reading of such

154 L

more hostile accounts as Thomas Hamilton’s Men and Manners in America (1833) and Fanny ∗Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) (pp. 190–2). Moskal (2000) looks interestingly at the broader influence or analogy of ∗Cervantes: ‘Ethel traces one path as Dulcinea and Fanny another as Quixote’ (pp. 34–5). London high society in the novel has ∗Silver-fork elements (see further Allen [2008], pp. 142–5), while the scenes involving poverty and the attempt to avoid arrest for debt draw on the Shelleys’ ‘early adventures’ in autumn 1814 (MWSL 2.261). There are various other biographical elements. Clorinda is evidently inspired partly by ∗Viviani. CC related Lodore directly to ‘the beastly character of Lord ∗Byron’ (CC 2.341). He is loosely Byronic in his restlessness and world-weariness and his ‘violent and dangerous passions’ (NSW 6.48), but such elements are shared with many characters in novels of the 1830s. Villiers, who is ‘imprudent from his belief in the goodness of his fellow creatures’ (NSW 6.107) has obvious aspects of PBS, as has the idealistic Saville. (More interestingly, the well-read Fanny’s reference to Demogorgon [NSW 6.225] suggests that she knows Prometheus Unbound; epigraphs from PBS, together with those from many other sources, especially ∗Wordsworth, ∗Moore and ∗Renaissance drama, encourage the reader to be, like Fanny, ‘conversing perpetually’ with her books.) Sunstein 48–9 suggests that MWS distributes ‘elements of her youthful self among the heroines of … Lodore: self-sufficiency and aspiration in the fearless, radical scholar, Fanny Derham; pride and spirit in spoiled Cornelia Lodore; dependency and need for love in gentle Ethel Villiers’. For Webster-Garrett (2006) the connection with Fanny is particularly interesting: she is ‘a veritable spokeswoman for Godwinian utilitarianism and Wollstonecraftian education who leads a life remarkably like that of Shelley in her roles as female philosopher, avid reader, and committed social reformer’ (p. 176); MWS ‘knew all too well the real-life penalties exacted on unorthodox, “masculine” women’ (p.  178). Gonda (1999) argues that ‘Fanny is both the woman Mary Shelley believed herself to be in relation to other women, and the ideal companion she sought and never found in her relationships with other women’ (p. 339); her life may be admirable but ‘it is a life whose freedom the heterosexual narrative prefers to contemplate from a safe distance, a kind of lesbian “wild zone”’ (p. 340).

Themes and Focus MWS wanted, at one stage, to call the novel ‘Lodore – a tale of the present time’ (MWSL 2.196). In contrast to her earlier novels, the focus is primarily

  Lodore 

155

domestic: for Sunstein 320 it represents ‘Mary Shelley in an unforced, contemplative mood’. Here marriage is a major concern—the variously successful or unsuccessful unions of the Lodores, the Villierses, Saville and Clorinda, Fanny’s parents and others—but also money and the lack of it: the ‘degrading and sordid miseries’ which, at the risk of censure, the narrative must record (NSW 6.201). The settings are mostly domestic. School life at ∗Eton establishes Lodore’s qualities both admirable and not—the proud, self-willed rebel who is also the protector of the unworldly Francis Derham (NSW 6.30–32). Much time is spent in ‘labyrinthine’, foggy ∗London (NSW 6.192–3). Locations there range from Cornelia’s luxurious house overlooking Hyde Park (260, 268) to the ‘row of low, shabby houses’ in one of which Villiers is detained for debt (248). One of the most memorable scenes – again domestic—is when Ethel’s mother fastens her earring for her at the House of Lords before disappearing once again (NSW 6.179). This focus on private life has sometimes been seen as evidence of MWS’s retreat from radicalism into bourgeois conventionality; in her late novels ‘she was no longer striving to express new or complex ideas’ (Blumberg [1993], p.  223). Later discussion tends to find Lodore more paradoxical: the novel both argues the case, especially through Fanny, for the independent woman and apparently exalts ‘the angel in the house’ in Ethel’s devoted daughterhood and marriage and her mother’s rediscovery of a maternal role and conduct. And it apparently condemns Lodore as an irresponsible aristocrat who has no understanding of women, yet makes him a caring father whose memory is revered by the irreproachable Ethel; it hints at the need for political reform yet reasserts the status quo by the end. One way of resolving such paradoxes is Richard Cronin’s conception of Lodore, and some of the Silver-Fork or fashionable novels which influenced it, as ‘hybrid’. Novels by ∗Bulwer, Pelham especially, combine the sentimental and the fashionable and use ‘two styles, the sentimental … and the styptic’ (Cronin [2000], pp. 43, 46). Partly under Bulwer’s influence, hybridization of character in Lodore ‘allows Lady Lodore’s act of renunciation … to be at once an exercise of heroic greatness of soul, and an action taken in obedience … “to the pride of her soul”’ [NSW 6.272]; it allows the ‘acerbic novella’ of Lodore’s marriage to co-exist with the ‘sentimental narrative’ of the years in Illinois (p. 49). It is possible to admire both Ethel and Fanny—compare NSW 6.219 on how they both act ‘from their own hearts—from their own sense of right’; the novel examines tolerantly, rather than ignoring, ‘the human capacity for self-deception,’ inconsistency and egotism (Cronin [2000], pp. 50–1). Others have felt that Lodore is politically more committed, less ‘hybrid’, than Cronin suggests, both where the position of the aristocracy and the

156 L

position of women are concerned. For Williams (2000) the opening sentence of the novel, which introduces Longfield in ‘the flattest and least agreeable part of the county of Essex’ (NSW 6.5), is a metaphor for a ‘society bled dry by an effete, self-indulgent aristocracy’ and the name Longfield is ‘surely a glance in the direction of ∗Field Place’ (p.  147; compare Shelley [1997a], p. 29). Lodore lives according to an irresponsible aristocratic code, abandoning his duties at home to wander abroad, both as a young man and after his marriage, caring more for slights to his honour than for the consequences of his actions. Williams (2000) sees volume one of Lodore as dwelling on ‘the “Lord” in “Lord Lodore”’ as ‘the major impediment’ to education and volume two on ‘the misery and unhappiness of an unenlightened, unreformed society governed by outmoded laws and traditions’, while in volume three Fanny ‘offers to explore the way forward through an enlightened commitment to learning’ (p.  151). The obstacles are formidable: progress is hampered by Lodore and by other fainéant members of the upper classes, whether the ‘privileged women’ Cornelia and Saville’s sisters or the ‘rather directionless’ Saville and Villiers (Shelley [1997a], p. 37). Stafford (2000) notes that the novel can be read as a ‘profound reflection on recent political history’, ‘in part at least … an allegory of the Reform Movement’ (p. 189)—this is one of the senses in which it is ‘a tale of the present time’. Nevertheless, Lodore ‘remains the most interesting and powerful character in the novel,’ his ‘embodiment of natural energy … far from Hatfield’s perception [NSW 6.90] of the corrupt aristocrat’ (p.  190). It is uncertain what is to replace the aristocracy, and Lodore retains ‘a lingering attachment to the past, and … to the Romantic heroism that seemed threatened by the brave new world of legal equality’ (p. 192). Allen (2008) argues that political allegory exists in the ‘complex, circular structure’ of the novel (p. 146). The hope is that the cyclical repetition of history can be broken: such a break within the narrative is Cornelia’s sacrifice and reunion with her ­daughter, while the passage about Fanny at the end of the novel represents a break ‘leading us outside of that narrative’ (p. 159). Fanny’s education was intended, successfully and in line with the ideas of ∗Wollstonecraft and ∗Godwin, to guard her ‘from all weakness, to make her complete in herself, and to render her independent and self-sufficing’ (NSW 6.218). Ethel, by comparison, may seem ‘saintly and unconvincing’ (Barton [2001], p. 10), a straightforward fulfilment of the author’s intention of portraying ‘in its simplicity, & all the beauty I could muster, the devotion of a young wife for the husband of her choice—The disasters she goes through being described—& their result in awakening her Mother’s affection’ (MWSL 2.185). But MWS is aware of the dangers and the origins of such idealization:

  Lodore 

157

figures like Ethel ‘embody male fantasies of feminine passivity’ (Shelley [1997a], p. 32). As Vargo points out, we are told that Ethel’s education by her father is ‘lamentably deficient’ in the cultivation of self-reliance (NSW 6.19); an education founded on ‘Milton’s Eve, and … the romance of chivalry’ (NSW 6.18) is likely to be ‘problematic’ for Wollstonecraft’s daughter (Shelley [1997a], p.  32). On occasion, ‘while enduring trials on behalf of Villiers’, Ethel does get as far as stating her own point of view, but doing so makes her tremble or faint (NSW 6.192, 238). ‘Such weakness symbolizes for Shelley … a threat to the social body as a whole if fragility and obedience in women are made a fetish’ (Shelley [1997a], p. 32). Cornelia’s lack of emotional warmth for much of the novel can also be seen as a product of her deficient education and of her difficult position in a society where the ‘maxims and laws’ are made by men. ‘She witnessed the downfall of several, as young and lovely as herself, and … beheld the sneers which were heaped as a tomb above their buried fame. She had vowed to herself never to become one of these. She was applauded for her pride, and held up as a pattern’ (NSW 6.116).

Reviews Reviews of Lodore were mostly favourable. Fraser’s Magazine for May 1835 now finds it likely that ‘Mrs. Shelley might have indeed been the author of Frankenstein … because there is common to both [novels] a depth and sweep of thought – a knowledge of human kind … and a boldness and directness in … displaying the motives and workings of the heart … which we certainly should have imagined to be far beyond the scope and power of a lady’ (p. 600; compare The New Monthly Magazine for June 1835, p. 236). Bennett (1998) points out that on the whole reviewers of both Lodore and Falkner ignore social and political aspects in favour of the personal (p. 103)—in particular what Fraser’s calls ‘the hopes and fears … of the fierce and tender passion’ (p. 601). As Vargo notes in Shelley (1997a), p. 531, Fanny Derham remains unmentioned while Elizabeth Fitzhenry is much praised: ‘a simple and amiable character … charmingly drawn’, says The Spectator for 17 October 1835 (p. 16); an exquisite miniature ‘of the old maid … with its respectable prejudices, and narrow but kindly feelings’ (The Examiner, 24 May 1835, pp. 323–4). For The Athenaeum (28 March 1835, p. 239), ‘there are few creations in modern fiction, sweeter than Ethel Villiers’, who grows from ‘a simple and innocent child’ to ‘a faithful and noble-spirited wife’. The Sun (15 April 1835, p. 2) thinks she ‘partakes rather over much of a beautiful idealism’ and prefers her mother, an ‘ably sustained personage throughout, inheriting

158 L

the strength equally with the weakness of her sex’. More generally The New Monthly Magazine (June 1835, pp. 236–7) is of the opinion that the novel ‘is not a faithful portrait of human nature’; ’Mrs. Shelley’s actors are creatures like herself, compounded of sentiment and feeling, and as such, they go on their way for the most part … rejoicing in the health and purity of their own intentions, buffeting the cold-hearted and misjudging world with the weapons of truth and uprightness, and finally making themselves … and … us perfectly happy’. Lodore will delight those ‘who desire, as we often do, to forget how cold, and base, and unrewarding is our real world’ (p. 237). Further reading: Hopkins (2002); Vargo (2005).

London Capital city where MWS was born, married and died and in or near which she spent much of her life. The population of the greater London area was just over a million in 1801, one and a half million in 1821, and over two million in 1841. MWS lived with her family at 29 The Polygon, Somers Town and then at 41 Skinner Street from 1807 to 1814 apart from her periods in Ramsgate and ∗Scotland. Mainly with PBS, she was at about seven different London addresses in 1814–1815 and at three more in spring 1816. In February 1817 they stayed at the Hunts’ in Hampstead, north of the city, and in February to March 1818 they were at 119 Great Russell Street. On her return from ∗Italy in 1823 MWS lived in London almost continuously until April 1833, for much of 1836 and from February 1837 to March 1839. She was nearby at ∗Putney and Richmond from then until about the beginning of June 1840, back in London for much of 1841 and early 1842 and in London and then Putney for much of August 1843 to March 1846, when she moved into 24 Chester Square, London, where she lived for periods in 1847, 1848–1849 and from autumn 1850 until her death in February 1851. Throughout her life, she engaged actively with the cultural life of the capital: lectures, museums, plays, opera. For example she was at ∗Coleridge’s lectures in 1810–1811, at André-Jacques Garnerin’s popular science lecture and demonstration in 1814 (MWSJ 56), at the British Museum in 1815 and 1818 (MWSJ 73, 78, 193), at the Royal Academy, at weddings and church services (see ∗Religion). She was admitted to the House of Commons in 1825 and probably in 1833 (MWSL i.466, 470; Bennett [1997], p. 65 and n.59). She watched Sir Thomas ∗Lawrence paint, ∗Paganini play and ∗Kean and the ∗Kembles act. She went to see the new Waterloo Bridge in 1817 (MWSJ 172)

  Lope de Vega y Carpio 

159

and the coronation of ∗William IV in 1831. Her social life was centred on London: hosting and going to gatherings, musical evenings at the ∗Novellos’ in the 1820s, visits to the ∗Robinsons in Paddington, seeing her father and old friends like the ∗Lambs. London was also the centre of the publishing trade. The city is ‘wonderful and celebrated’ for Frankenstein (NSW 1.121), yet it could also be the ‘labyrinthine’ London of Lodore (NSW 6.192–3), with its threats of poverty and arrest for debt. Later MWS tried to live more cheaply elsewhere but was often drawn back to London and the social and intellectual stimulus for which she longed.

Lope de Vega y Carpio (1562–1635) Spanish playwright and poet. ‘Lope de Vega’ in Spanish Lives considers his life, work and role in the establishment of theatre in ∗Spain. Lope’s work, like much Spanish literature, suffers from diffuseness (LL 2.195) but ‘there may be found in his plays a richness of invention, a freshness and variety of ideas, and a vivacity of dialogue unsurpassed by any author’ (LL 2.208). This comment draws on Henry, Lord Holland’s Some Account of the Life and Writings of Lope … de Vega (1806). Other sources are ∗Southey’s review of Holland’s work in The Quarterly Review for October 1818, and Juan Perez de Montalbán’s life attached to the 1776–1779 Obras Sueltas (see LL 2.xxxi, 171 n.b and 208n.).

Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–1492) Florentine ruler and poet, often known as ‘Lorenzo the Magnificent’. ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici (Considered as a Poet)’ in Italian Lives celebrates his ‘excellent sense of justice and duty’ (LL 1.83), patronage of arts and learning, use of the vernacular in his poems, and their ‘simplicity and vivacity’ (80). MWS’s main source is William Roscoe’s The Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1795) (LL 1.xlix). The life functions also as ‘a prelude to a narrative of the fall of ∗Florence (taken up in “∗Machiavelli” and “∗Guicciardini”)’ (LL 1.77 note a). The account of Lorenzo is followed by brief coverage of his associates Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Angelo Poliziano and Bernardo and Luca Pulci; Luigi ∗Pulci is treated at greater length.

160 L

Loudon, Jane Webb (1807–1858) Author of The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, published anonymously in 1827. (Jane Webb married John Loudon in 1830.) Frankenstein is clearly a strong influence on the reanimation of the mummy who, like the creature, ‘is pre-eminently a child of reason and enlightenment’ (Hopkins [2003], p. 8). But the politics of Loudon’s novel are contrastingly conservative; for Hopkins it is a ‘sensational but ultimately pious corrective to the pessimism and atheism of Mary Shelley’ (p. 14). There is a similar relation between The Mummy and The Last Man, which were both published, a year apart, by ∗Colburn. ‘In both a man hangs back from the crown while an ambitious woman pushes forward for it’ (Hopkins [2003], p. 10). Both are set in the future and include travel by balloon. But Loudon endorses monarchical rule (and religious belief ) and hers is ‘a positive future nurtured by scientific progress in contrast to Shelley’s apocalypse’ (Page [2012a], p. 1492).

Louvet de Couvray, Jean-Baptiste (1760–1797) Politician and author of Les Amours du Chevalier de Faublas (1786–1791). In 1814 MWS read his memoirs and began writing his life (MWSJ 44).

The Loves of the Poets Work by Anna Brownell ∗Jameson reviewed by MWS in The Westminster Review for October 1829. She opens with quotations on love from ∗Plato’s Symposium as translated by PBS and from PBS’s ‘Essay on Love’ and declares that ‘above all, a poet’s soul is love’ (NSW 2.196). She finds particularly interesting Jameson’s coverage of ‘conjugal poetry’, written mostly by women, and discusses why they are usually more constant than the male poet-lovers: among the reasons being, ‘A woman’s love is tenderness, and may wed itself to the lost and dead. A man’s is passion, and must expend itself on the living … A solitary woman is the world’s victim, and there is heroism in her consecration. A man whose fate is not allied to a female … is divested of every poetical attribute’ (NSW 2.198–9).

 Lucan 

161

Lucan (AD 39–65) Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, poet. MWS read his Pharsalia in 1819 (MWSJ 293–8). Weiner (2015) finds possible links—if she had some earlier knowledge of the poem—with Frankenstein, particularly the usurpation by Lucan’s Erichtho of ‘the power of Nature to reanimate a corpse that has been reduced to the sum of its constituent parts’ (p. 66).

Lucca Tuscan city visited by MWS in August 1820 and, to see ∗Sgricci perform, twice in January 1821. Lucca, which was ruled by the historical Castruccio Castracani between 1316 and 1328, is one of the main settings in Valperga.

Lucretius Carus, Titus (c.99–55 BCE) MWS notes her reading of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura in 1820 (MWSJ 324–7, 329–30). Weiner (2015) suggests that she may have read the work earlier in translation or extracts and posits the influence of its atheism and materialism on the ethics, science and idea of monstrosity of Frankenstein.

M

Machiavelli, Niccolò (1469–1527) Florentine statesman and political theorist. MWS read La vita di Castruccio Castracani da Lucca in spring 1820 and Historie Fiorentine in spring 1822 (MWSJ 313–14, 406–8). She is likely to have read Il Principe in about the same period. Bennett (1997a) discusses the similarities and differences of attitude to Castruccio in Machiavelli’s life and in Valperga. He produces a story ‘of a lauded hero whose virtù is defeated by fortuna while [she] laments the bloody trail of a cruel tyrant’ but these ‘antithetical perspectives … lead, albeit through strikingly different means, to similar reformist political agendas’ (p.  139). In the ‘discursive and very political’ (LL 1.li) ‘Machiavelli’ MWS probes his position further, debating ‘whether [in The Prince] he sincerely recommended the detestable principles of government which he appears to advocate, or used the weapons of irony and sarcasm to denounce a system of tyranny which then oppressed his native country’ (Italian Lives, LL 1.122). Drawing widely on Machiavelli’s letters and on the histories of ∗Guicciardini and ∗Sismondi, she presents a mostly sympathetic figure while conceding that ‘his real intentions form a question, perhaps, never to be decided’ (LL 1.146).

© The Author(s) 2019 M. Garrett, The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Palgrave Literary Dictionaries, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56639-3_13

163

164 M

‘Madame d’Houtetot’ Essay in The ∗Liberal, Volume 3, published on 26 April 1823, about Elisabeth-­ Sophie-­ Françoise, Comtesse d’Houdetôt (1730–1813). She entered an unsuitable marriage, the original circumstances of which ‘offend and even disgust those who are accustomed to look upon any disposal of the person of woman, however legalized, as disgraceful, unless it be sanctioned by the feelings of the heart’ (NSW 2.118). In spite of this, and the problems resulting from ∗Rousseau’s unrequited passion for her, she maintained her warmth, gentleness, and integrity and showed great loyalty, in the manner of the day, to her lover the Marquis de Saint-Lambert. At her death, ‘we lost … the last relic of the age of Louis XV’ (NSW 2.127). The principal sources are LouiseFlorence d’Epinay’s Mémoires et Correspondance (1818)—directly translated in places (see notes to NSW 2.118, 119, 120)—and Rousseau’s Confessions (1781–1788), Book IX.

Maie see Nicknames, Mary Shelley’s Maison Chapuis (or Chappuis) House (no longer extant) at Montalègre on Lake Geneva. The Shelleys and CC lived here in the summer of 1816, a short walk downhill from ∗Villa Diodati.

Manners-Sutton, Sir Charles and Ellen, Lady (1780–1845) and (1791–1845) Friends of MWS by 1830. She and they frequently attended each other’s social gatherings; they may have met through ∗Moore (MWSJ 514 n.3). Ellen was the sister of Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington. Sir Charles (Viscount Canterbury from March 1835), a Tory politician, was Speaker of the House of Commons between 1817 and 1835. The friendship seems to have flourished in spite of potential political differences—Sir Charles opposed parliamentary reform and Catholic emancipation—and MWS felt that the Whigs treated him ‘most shabbily’ in their successful opposition to his re-­ election in 1835 (MWSL 2.223).

 Manfred 

165

Manfred (1232–1266) King of Naples and Sicily 1258–1266, illegitimate son of Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen. He was killed in battle against Charles of Anjou, and in the nineteenth century was often regarded as a martyr to the cause of an ∗Italy free from foreign and papal domination. MWS was considering writing a tragedy about him by November 1822 and showed ∗Godwin a draft by February 1824; she abandoned the project probably as a result of his discouraging response: see Marshall (1889), vol. 2, pp. 51–2, 107. In ‘Giovanni Villani’ she defends Manfred against Villani’s hostile account as ‘the noblest king and the most accomplished cavalier that ever existed’ (NSW 2.136). In Valperga Castruccio’s father was Manfred’s ‘faithful page and companion’ (NSW 3.8). The main sources for MWS’s knowledge of Manfred were ∗Sismondi’s Histoire des républiques italiennes du Moyen-âge and, probably, Pietro Giannone’s Dell’istoria civile del Regno di Napoli (1723).

Mantell, Gideon (1790–1852) Geologist, palaeontologist, and surgeon who knew MWS by the late 1830s. He is renowned especially for his discoveries about what were later known as dinosaurs. He gave her copies of at least two of his books—probably Wonders of Geology (1838) or Thoughts on a Pebble (1836), and Thoughts on Animalcules, or A Glimpse of the Invisible World Revealed by the Microscope (1846) (see MWSL 2.324 and n.1, 3.304 and n, and Dean [1981], pp. 24, 26). Mantell was her near neighbour in Chester Place, London, from the mid–1840s and gave medical assistance when she was taken ill with ‘neuralgia of the heart’ in March 1846 (MWSL 3.283n.3). Mantell records reading ‘Frankenstein, a most horrific production’, in September 1823, and refers to it again in a lecture of 1834: when describing the iguanodon he had discovered ‘like Frankenstein, he was actually appalled at the being which rose beneath his meditations’ (Dean [1981], pp. 22–3). Mantell was also interested in PBS’s poetry and Dean argues that MWS ‘meant more to him as memorabilia than as a person’ (p. 29).

166 M

Manzoni, Alessandro (1785–1873) Novelist whose use of Tuscan encouraged its acceptance as standard Italian. MWS liked ‘the truth & perfect Italianism of the manners & descriptions’ of I promessi sposi (1825–1826), the ‘beautiful language … not a bad imitation’ of the fourteenth-century masters (∗Dante, ∗Petrarch, ∗Boccaccio) and ‘the passion & even sublimity of parts’ (MWSL 2.48). With his novel he ‘redeemed the reputation of his country’, whose spirit seemed to have been crushed (‘Modern Italian Romances’, LL 4.229–30). The work encourages ‘piety and resignation’ but succeeds in impressing ‘the reader with a deep sense of the mischiefs that ensue from a people being kept in a state of bigotry and ignorance’; nevertheless, Manzoni has ‘become a bigot and a slave. His life is spent in churches’ (LL 4.231). MWS discusses his life and work further, and more tolerantly, in Rambles (NSW 8.331–4). She may have proposed translating I promessi sposi for John ∗Murray in 1828 (MWSL 2.56 and n.2).

Marino, Giambattista (1569–1625) Poet, known to MWS as Marini. ‘Marini’ in Italian Lives looks briefly at his carefree disposition, his literary quarrels and his Adone, where, LL 1.liii suggests, the incest theme may have interested her.

Marshall, Florence Ashton (Mrs Julian Marshall) (1843–1922) Composer and biographer. Her Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1889) was largely controlled by the agenda of Jane, Lady ∗Shelley, and the selective material she provided; MWS’s ‘literary authority is subsumed in the name of middle-class respectability and her heirs’ “higher purpose” of consolidating Percy Shelley’s literary reputation’ (Vargo [2004], p.  51). Marshall’s MWS is self-sacrificing, modest, and politically conservative, a version which long remained influential.

  Martineau, Harriet 

167

Martineau, Harriet (1802–1876) Writer. MWS read her novel Deerbrook (1839) in spring 1839. ‘Her pictures are … graphic & true to nature … Without Miss ∗Austen’s humour she has all her vividness & correctness. To compensate for the absence of humour she has higher philosophical views’ (MWSL 2.314). MWS also, in December 1845 or January 1846, read Martineau’s Forest and Game-law Tales (1845–6) (MWSL 3.274, 275 n.2) Writing to Claire Clairmont, in December 1844 (MWSL 3.168–9), she had expressed scepticism about Martineau’s alleged cure by mesmerism as described in a recent series of letters to The Athenaeum.

Marx, Karl (1818–1883) Social theorist. For Frankensteinian elements and imagery in his writings, see Baldick 121–40. Michie (1990) examines ‘the novel’s systematic attempt to deal with the issue of material production and the problems that arise from it’ (p. 93); creature and creator are bound together like worker and capitalist and both can be considered alienated workers (p. 94). Further reading: Moretti (1983).

‘Mason, Mrs’ Margaret, Countess of Mount Cashell (1772–1835) was known by this name after leaving her husband for George William Tighe. They settled in ∗Pisa in 1814, where the Shelleys and CC, almost certainly with a letter of introduction from ∗Godwin (see MWSJ 585), met Mrs Mason on 30 September 1819. They were interested by her involvement in Irish and English radical politics in the 1790s and by her connection with ∗Wollstonecraft, who had been her governess in 1786–1787 and from whose Original Stories from Real Life (1788) she took the name Mrs Mason. Her own books for children include Stories of Old Daniel: or Tales of Wonder and Delight (published in the Godwins’ Juvenile Library, 1807; eighth edition 1822). Robinson, in BSM 10.11, sees ‘the explicit moralistic warnings against pride, selfishness, and disobedience in Proserpine and Midas’ as evidence of her influence. (Carlson [2007] explores this influence further: see Proserpine.)

168 M

Mrs Mason saw much of MWS in Pisa in the first half of 1820 but remained, in the long term, closer to CC.  Her children by Tighe were ∗Galloni and Nerina Cini (1815–1874).

Mathilda Short novel. MWS wrote the first draft, The Fields of Fancy, between 4 August and 12 September 1819 and revised it as Mathilda in autumn and winter 1819–1820, dating it 9 November 1819 (NSW 2.2). (Although MWS referred to the work as ‘Matilda’ in her letters, she spells the character’s name ‘Mathilda’ in the text.) The work remained unpublished until 1959. In Mathilda, the first-person narrative recounts Mathilda’s lonely childhood: she was brought up in ∗Scotland by her aunt while her father, desolate at the death of her mother, lived and travelled abroad. When she is sixteen she is reunited with her father, who takes her to ∗London. At first, their life together is one of extraordinary happiness and harmony, but when another man pays attentions to her the father suddenly becomes troubled and apparently hostile towards her. She cannot make him explain the change. When they move to his country estate in Yorkshire, he treats her rather more reasonably but remains highly anguished, alternating between melancholy and despair. Eventually, at her entreaty, he confesses his incestuous love for her, plunging them both into a state of mixed tenderness and repulsion. Both know they must separate. The father goes, leaving a letter asking for forgiveness, explaining the course of his love, his remorse and his continuing inability to conquer his feelings. Fearing that he will kill himself, Mathilda follows his route with his steward. They reach the coast and find that he has indeed drowned. Stunned with shock, and anxious not to reveal the secret of her father’s love, she longs for solitude. After some weeks, she succeeds in disappearing from her guardian’s house in London, leaving the impression that she too has taken her own life. She withdraws to a ‘solitary house on a wide plain’ (NSW 2.44) in the north of England. She longs for death but partially distracts herself through study. At last she meets and becomes friends with Woodville; ‘he also being most unhappy we were well fitted to be a mutual consolation to each other, if I had not been hardened to stone by the Medusa head of Misery’ (NSW 2.47). Woodville is a poet and idealist, a believer in ‘the divinity of genius’ (2.48). His beloved Elinor died before they could marry. He tells Mathilda about his past and attempts to bring her consolation; she is inspired by his ideas and sometimes lifted from her despair. But she cannot tell him the cause of her suffering, which unlike his involves ‘infamy and guilt’

  Mathilda 

169

(2.52), and she is sometimes ‘captious’ (2.55) with him. She asks him to die with her. He eloquently dissuades her from suicide on the grounds of one’s possible utility and duty to others, but she continues to believe herself ‘polluted by the unnatural love I had inspired, and that I was a creature cursed and set apart by nature’ (NSW 2.60). While Woodville is away visiting his sick mother, Mathilda wanders off and becomes lost, is ill after a night spent outside, and develops consumption. She writes her story, recalls her suffering and briefer joy, and looks forward to death. The Fields of Fancy starts with a chapter in which the author or narrator has suffered, in ∗Rome, ‘a misfortune that reduced me to misery and despair’ (NSW 2.351; William ∗Shelley died in Rome in June 1819.) The spirit Fantasia, attempting to distract her from grief, transports her to the Elysian Fields. Here Diotima (named for the figure who teaches Socrates the philosophy of love in ∗Plato’s Symposium) talks to her disciples about the ‘spirit of beauty & of sympathy which pervades all things’ (NSW 2.355). But a young woman responds by saying how difficult it is to escape from or forget the tortures of the heart she experienced on earth (359). In explanation, she tells substantially the same story as Mathilda. In the earlier version, Clemit (1997) argues, the ‘discrepancy between the instructive tenor of the frame and the wish-fulfilment of the inset narrative highlights the unreliability of Mathilda’s first-person account and invites us to read her story as a warning of the dangers of selfish passion’ (p. 154). For Allen (2008) the move is from a structure, in The Fields of Fancy, ‘in which mourning and melancholia are opposed to philosophy’, to one in Mathilda where they become ‘philosophical subjects themselves’ (p.  60); Mathilda resists closure, ‘refraining from offering the reader an explicit interpretation of the heroine’s tale’ (Schönfelder [2013], p. 167).

Sources and Intertexts The novella has no close source but is full of intertextual reference and analogy. Mellor (1988) notes that the ‘forbidden sexual partner’ is called Matilda in ∗Lewis’s The Monk, ∗Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, and PBS’s Zastrozzi, and Matelda in ∗Dante’s Purgatorio (p. 195). (For Mellor MWS’s naming of Mathilda therefore indicates that ‘a daughter-like woman is not a legitimate love-object for men’, thus questioning ‘the bourgeois sexual practices’ which defined this submissive woman as a suitable match ‘for an older, wiser, economically secure, and “fatherly” man’ [p. 195].) Dante is the most important of these intertexts. Clemit (1997), p.  160, points out that, like Matelda,

170 M

Mathilda starts as a ‘figure of purity’, and her father imagines her as Beatrice-­ like (NSW 2.34); later, like Dante waiting for Beatrice to descend, she longs ‘to see the car of light descend with my long lost parent’ (NSW 2.62–3). Mathilda as a whole can be interpreted as a ‘purgatorial text’, a confessional ‘narrative of what must be processed before a final state of spiritual and psychological peace can be achieved, but with no assurance of success’ (Shelley [2017], p. 12). As first noted in Shelley (1959), p. ix, a probable influence on the title and structure of The Fields of Fancy is ∗Wollstonecraft’s unfinished ‘The Cave of Fancy’. There a spirit in a purgatory-like cavern tells Sagesta the story of her unhappy marriage and adulterous (but resisted) love (WMW 1.199–206). Todd in Wollstonecraft and Shelley (1991), pp. xviii–xxi, considers a number of other links with Wollstonecraft. Clemit (1997) discusses ways in which the revision of the novella as Mathilda makes it more Godwinian: MWS adds causal explanations for characters’ later behaviour—the father’s ‘indulgent, aristocratic education’, Mathilda’s loss of her nurse—in line with ∗Godwin’s ‘insistence on the influence of circumstance on character’ (pp. 158–9). And Mathilda as narrator gives ‘a confessional account of traumatic experience in the manner of ’ novels including Caleb Williams (pp.  157–8). Schönfelder (2013) concludes that Mathilda ‘rejects even more clearly the period’s therapeutic optimism than Wollstonecraft’s and Godwin’s’ The Wrongs of Woman and Mandeville’ (p. 165). (For links to Godwin’s Fleetwood see Rajan [1994], pp. 52–4). Especially through Woodville, who is ‘for all his visionary insight … unable to respond sufficiently to Mathilda’s human need’ (Clemit [2003], p.  40), Mathilda also questions the utopianism of PBS’s work. For Franklin (2013) such questioning has a Byronic context: ‘This anti-fairy tale is an exercise in tragic-comedy [sic] and existential irony as bitter as any [Byron] could produce’ (p. 52). Franklin’s examples include a link between the theme of ‘father and daughter separated … yet somehow eternally bound to each other in defiance of the world’s disapprobation’ in Mathilda and the address to ‘My daughter!’ in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III, stanzas 115–18. Incest features in a number of contemporary works. In 1818–1819 MWS discussed The Cenci with PBS (NSW 2.283), translated one of its main sources (see ‘Relation of the Death of the Family of the Cenci’), re-read Godwin’s Mandeville and PBS’s Laon and Cythna (The Revolt of Islam) (MWSJ 206, 221, 251; see also 295) and began translating ∗Alfieri’s incest play Mirra (MWSJ 226 and PBSL 2.39; mentioned by Mathilda in chapter 4, NSW 2.20). She was also aware of the original tale of Myrrha in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (MWSJ 74) and no doubt of the destructive consequences of incestuous desire in such

  Mathilda 

171

Renaissance plays as Massinger’s The Unnatural Combat and Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Mathilda differs significantly, however, from most other incest narratives. There is no physical consummation but, as Allen (2008) says, ‘The father’s confession of incestuous desire … shatters the daughter’s subjectivity just as completely as does physical violation in The Cenci’ (p. 50). And the situation is further problematized by the extent to which Mathilda returns her father’s love. Hill-Miller (1995) observes that ‘Like actual incest victims, she is motherless, wracked by guilt, and certain she is to blame’, ‘seeks to recapture the sense of specialness she felt with her father … by pining to die and be reunited with him spiritually, in a world beyond the complications of sex’, ‘cannot respond to other men’, ‘is tormented by the need for secrecy and silence’, and ‘is tortured by her isolation’ (p. 103). Other intertexts include ∗Milton’s Paradise Lost. Mathilda ‘must ever lament, those few short months of Paradisaical bliss; I disobeyed no command, I ate no apple, and yet I was ruthlessly driven from it. Alas! my companion did, and I was precipitated in his fall’ (NSW 2.17). Her status as ‘both guilt-ridden and innocent, both sexual transgressor and sexually pure, gains added resonance from … the Christian myth of transgression’ in Milton (Clemit [1997], p. 160). NSW 2.2. compares the death obsession of Mathilda and the heroine of Samuel ∗Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–1748). See Weber (2009) for Mathilda as a version of King Lear which inverts the ‘power play’ of the relationship between Lear and Cordelia (p. 125). Mathilda identifies, Schönfelder (2013) points out, with Oedipus, Matelda, ∗Wordsworth’s Lucy, Proserpine, Cain, Job and many other characters (p. 183). This ‘shifting intertextual web … captures her identity crisis and signals a crisis of meaning, both of which are characteristic of the posttraumatic. … Because her traumatic past seems to resist direct expression, Shelley has Mathilda grasp at literary comparisons in an attempt to construct some meaningful connections to her obscure past’ (p. 186).

Biographical Aspects MWS sent the manuscript of Mathilda to Godwin in May 1820 with a view to his organizing publication. Maria ∗Gisborne recorded that while ‘he thinks very highly of some of the parts’, ‘The subject he says is disgusting and detestable; and there ought to be … a preface’ preventing readers ‘from being tormented by the apprehension from moment to moment of the fall of the heroine’ (Gisborne and Williams [1951], p. 44). It has often been assumed that Godwin’s response, and his failure to attempt publication, indicates fear

172 M

that readers would assume that the work reflected an incestuous relationship between him and the author. Harpold (1989) claims that his refusal to help with publication ‘defends against the daughter’s effort to alter the oedipal structure that defines her place as daughter, mother and wife, relative to the father’ (p. 66). His refusal ‘robs his daughter of her voice in a symbolic form of father-daughter incestuous violence’ (Chatterjee [1997], p.  147). But Bennett (1998) argues robustly that the two most likely motivations for Godwin and MWS not to proceed to publication were fear of reviving earlier rumours about incestuous activity involving PBS, MWS and CC (and Byron), and ‘recognition that for a woman … the subject of incest was simply not acceptable and would incur painful consequences’, probably including loss of custody of her son (pp. 51–2). Arguably, Mathilda is a projection and displacement of MWS’s own ‘deepest and most ambivalent feelings towards her father’ in the context of his unsympathetic response to her depression in 1819, ‘a Freudian dream-work’ where she ‘both purges and consummates her incestuous fantasies’ (Mellor [1988], pp. 193, 195). But on the whole the most direct biographical readings—Nitchie’s ‘The three main characters are clearly Mary herself, Godwin, and Shelley’ (Shelley [1959], p. vii), Mathilda as a response only to the loss of William Shelley or to Godwin’s or PBS’s inadequate reaction to the loss— have given way to more nuanced commentary on unequal and traumatic gender relations. To take the work as an autobiographical outpouring is to miss its ‘careful craftsmanship in creating a character who constructs her life as a dramatic text, thereby depicting the dangers of a debilitating confusion of life with art and reality with illusion’ (Bunnell [2013], p. 62).

Themes Themes and preoccupations of Mathilda include, as well as incest, suicide— Woodville argues against it but cannot be much help in his ignorance of the complex situation and psychology which direct the heroine towards it; for contexts see Faubert (2013) and Wollstonecraft and Shelley (1991), pp. xxii– v. Other studies look at Mathilda and the female ∗Gothic (Miller [2008]), at ‘the tensions and paradoxes within an identity disrupted by trauma’ (Schönfelder [2013], p. 164), at the text as poised uncertainly between lyric and narrative (Rajan [1994], pp.  47–8) or as a coming of age parable, the story both ‘of the process by which daughters are socialized into womanhood’ and of ‘the individual daughter’s confrontation with the implications of her burgeoning sexuality’ (Hill-Miller [1995], p.  105). Several commentators

  Maturin, Rev Charles 

173

interpret Mathilda’s narrative as a form of therapy: she has the ‘power of generating her own story and thereby assuring her posthumous reception’ (Weber [2009], p. 125); she ‘achieves a kind of redemption through … the confessional writing of her story, in the end rejecting the “silence” in which she was schooled by her aunt and then, even more painfully, by her father’ (Bennett [1998], p. 54). There was also a therapeutic effect, MWS says, for the author: ‘when I wrote Matilda [sic] … the inspiration was sufficient to quell my wretchedness temporarily’ (MWSJ 442). Mathilda, abridged by Eileen Horne, was read by Emilia Fox on BBC Radio 4 in March 2011. Further reading: Jacobus (1999); Joffe (2007); Turner (2017).

Maturin, Rev Charles (1780–1824) Novelist and playwright. MWS saw ∗Kean in his Manuel at Drury Lane in March 1817 (MWSJ 166) and read his play Bertram and three of his novels between 1816 and 1818 (MWSJ 131, 141, 185, 230). In his Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), as in Frankenstein, the main character is excluded from society by secret knowledge.

‘Maurice or the Fisher’s Cot. A Tale’ Manuscript children’s story for ∗Galloni, written in summer 1820, rediscovered in 1997 and published in 1998. A traveller feels drawn to, and asks about, a boy whom he sees in a funeral procession at ∗Torquay. He is told that the boy, Maurice, lived with the now dead fisherman, the good and industrious old Barnet, after the death of Barnet’s wife. On his return to Torquay, the traveller seeks out Maurice. Barnet’s brother has told him that he must vacate the cottage within a week. He tells the traveller how he had to leave home because of his parents’ poverty and his father’s unkindness. The traveller offers him a home and tells him his own story. His young son, Henry, disappeared in Devon and he comes back every year to search for him. Recently he came across a woman who confessed to stealing the child and told him how he eventually went away. Maurice, of course, turns out to be Henry. He goes to live with his real, kind father and mother, but there are still visits to the fisher’s cot, father and son working the garden and doing good to the locals. Years later, after his travels, Henry finds that the cottage has gone but builds a new

174 M

house nearby for a poor fisherman and, whenever he comes back to Devon, contemplates the past and his good fortune. There are elements of PBS in Maurice and his father: the boy goes to ∗Eton, the father is inspired by ancient temples (LL 4.172; see for example PBSL 2.72–5) and becomes an idealist Shelleyan architect, designing buildings more beautiful than people want (LL 4.173); father and son don’t fish because they don’t want to harm animals (177). Markley (1999) compares Mathilda where ‘a long deferred reunion of father and child’ has tragic rather than happy consequences (p.  6). Turner (2017), however, feels that ‘Maurice’ is ‘pessimistic about the regenerative potential of the family’, its ‘nominally happy ending compromised by Dame Smithson’s despair, by the satirical note of the coda, and by the entropic final scene, in which the adult Henry, who does not appear to have his own wife or child, stands alone on the site of Old Barnet’s cottage’ (p. 171). Further reading: Carlson (2007).

Mavrokordatos, Alexandros (1791–1865) Greek exile, often known by the Italianized form of his name ‘Mavrocordato’ and by the courtesy title Prince, whom MWS met in ∗Pisa in December 1820. He was introduced to the Shelleys by ∗Pacchiani (MWSL 1.183). He became her Greek teacher and she sometimes his English teacher and he became much more her friend than PBS’s. She took an informed and excited interest in Mavrokordatos’ aspirations for an independent ∗Greece, particularly after the outbreak of the Greek Revolution in March 1821: see MWSJ 359 and notes 1 and 2. He left Italy for Greece in June 1821, was President in 1822–1823 (and later several times Prime Minister) and was with ∗Byron in Missolonghi in 1824. Mavrokordatos was in London as ambassador in 1839–1841 and saw MWS probably in January 1840 (see MWS 585). Further reading: Beaton (2013).

Mazzini, Giuseppe (1805–1872) Revolutionary, proponent of the Italian Risorgimento. Crook (1999) concludes that MWS was ‘on the fringes at least of Mazzini’s Young Italy well

  Medwin, Thomas 

175

before September 1843’ when she probably met ∗Gatteschi (p.  417). In England, where he lived in exile from 1837, Mazzini knew ∗Lardner, ∗Bowring and ∗Carlyle. See also: ‘Modern Italian Romances’.

Medwin, Thomas (1788–1869) PBS’s second cousin. He joined the Shelleys in ∗Pisa in October 1820 and was with them until February 1821 and again between November 1821 and March 1822. They both found him boring and irritating: ‘M. has no sympathy with our tastes or conversation—he is infinitely common place and is as silent as a fireskreen but not half so useful’ (MWSL 1.180). Medwin published Conversations of Lord Byron (1824), adding a ‘Memoir of Shelley’ which was ‘one mass of mistakes’ (MWSL 1.455). In 1846, she expressed concern about what effect his The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1847) would have on the living in ‘these … scandal-mongering days’ (MWSL 3.284). Soon afterwards he told her that he could not be expected to refrain from publishing the work unless she would indemnify him for the financial loss involved (MWSL 3.286–7 n.2). She interpreted this, probably correctly, as attempted blackmail, did not respond and did not read the book when it appeared (MWSL 3.286, 320). Markley in LL 4.lxxxvi n.33 finds signs of the influence of Falkner on Medwin’s Lady Singleton (1843).

Melville, Herman (1819–1891) Novelist. He bought a copy of Frankenstein in ∗London in 1849. Baldick discusses how in Moby Dick (1851) Ahab, like Frankenstein, tries to subdue Nature; but his ‘willed resistance to common human sympathies has refashioned him as an artificial being, the creature and plaything of his own monomania. He is … both obsessed creator and outcast creature’ (77). ‘The Bell Tower’ (1855), where the creature kills the creator, also has evident connections with Frankenstein; Young (2008) studies it as a fable suggestive of black American slavery (pp. 42–4).

176 M

Memoirs of William Godwin MWS’s anonymous introduction to the edition of her father’s Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) published by ∗Colburn and Bentley in April 1831. She gives details of his youth and literary career, celebrates the boldness, eloquence, ‘heartfelt sincerity and love of truth’ (NSW 2.246) of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), and supports the claim of Caleb Williams to be regarded as the best novel in English. Here ‘All that might have offended, as hard and republican in his larger work, was obliterated by the splendour and noble beauty of the character of Falkland’ (NSW 2.247). (Later she claims Falkland as ‘the being of fancy … at once the most real and the most grand’ since Hamlet [NSW 2.251].) She goes on to give details of Godwin’s role in the acquittal of the accused in the Treason Trials of 1794, his marriage to ∗Wollstonecraft, her works and her virtues, his many notable writings since Caleb Williams, his ‘many and various conquests’ in the ‘universe of thought’ (NSW 2.251).

Mendoza, Diego Hurtado de (1503–1575) Poet, diplomat and possible author of Lazarillo de Tormes, a work admired by MWS in Spanish Lives for ‘the graphic descriptions, the penetration into character, the worldly knowledge, the vivacity and humour’ (LL 2.68). She disapproves of Mendoza’s activities as the Emperor Charles V’s captain-­general of Siena, where ‘he felt no remorse in crushing the liberties of a republic’ (LL 2.70). As a poet he followed ∗Boscán in introducing ‘the Italian style’; ‘Though a bitter enemy to the spirit of liberty in ∗Italy, he could yet appreciate and profit by the highly advanced state of poetry and literature in that country, of which this very spirit was the parent’ (LL 2.72). The main source for the life is José López de Sedano’s Parnaso Español (1768–1778) (LL 2.xxix).

Mengaldo, Cavaliere Angelo (1787–1869) Poet, translator and soldier. He was a friend of ∗Byron and the Hoppners; MWS mentions going ‘to the Library & shopping’ with Mengaldo and Isabella Hoppner in ∗Venice on 28 September 1818 (MWSJ 228). On 20

  Mer de Glace 

177

October when she was at the Hoppners’ he related three ghost stories, ‘two that occurred to himself ’, which she recorded in MWSJ 230–3. She used the second story in ‘On Ghosts’.

Mer de Glace Glacier on Mont Blanc, popular with visitors since the 1780s. MWS went there on 25 July 1816 and thought it ‘the most desolate place in the world’ (MWSJ 119). She uses it as the setting for the confrontation between Frankenstein and the creature in Frankenstein (NSW 1.72–4). Further reading: Nardin (1999).

Mérimée, Prosper (1803–1870) Writer (now best known for ‘Carmen’, 1845) and Inspector General of Historic Monuments in France (1834–1860). MWS met him in ∗Paris in 1828. He was attracted to her and she characterized him as ‘a man of talent— a poet’, one ‘in whom sensibility is joined to activity of thought—and the softest sweetness to chivalrous daring’ (MWSL 2.41). She returned a letter from him (no longer extant) on the grounds that she is not a coquette and he may come to regret the feelings he has expressed, but promises him sympathetic friendship provided he remains worthy of it (MWSL 2.40). She may have translated ballads by Mérimée (see MWSL 2.62 n.2) and she promoted his work in two reviews: see Illyrian Poems—Feudal Scenes and ‘Chronique du temps de Charles IX’. Further reading: Bennett and Little (1979).

Metastasio, Pietro (1698–1782) Poet, dramatist and opera librettist. MWS records reading him in April 1819 (MWSJ 258–9). ‘Metastasio’ in Italian Lives, which draws on Charles Burney’s The Present State of Music in Germany (1773) and Memoirs of Metastasio (1796) (LL 1.liv), emphasizes his personal loyalty and amiable disposition. ‘It was the poet’s aim and pleasure … to make virtue attractive, and

178 M

to paint patriotism, self-sacrifice and the best affections of the soul, in glowing and alluring colours’ (LL 1.223).

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) Renaissance artist. His ‘majestic powers of conception’ are well known but ‘there is something of extravagant—something which is not absolute beauty— in most of his works at ∗Florence’ (NSW 8.309). MWS does not admire his Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel in ∗Rome but the ceiling paintings ‘have that simple grandeur that Michael Angelo alone could confer on a single figure, making it complete in itself ’ (NSW 8.351–2).

Midas: A Drama in Two Acts ‘Short mythological comic drama in verse’ (MWSL 2.122), probably started soon after 4 May 1820 (NSW 2.69) and finished by the end of winter 1820–1821 (BSM 10.11). MWS hoped to publish it with Proserpine; after she had placed that work she tried to publish Midas separately in the Juvenile Forget-Me-Not, the Literary Souvenir or the New Year’s Gift and Juvenile Souvenir (MWSL 2.122, 161), but it remained in manuscript until 1922 apart from the songs for Apollo and Pan, written by PBS, which had appeared in PBS 1824. Midas, king of Phrygia, comes upon the gods Apollo and Pan who compete in song. The local god Tmolus awards victory to Apollo. Midas declares that he thinks Pan should have won and Apollo, ‘as a symbol of thy blunted sense’ (NSW 2.97), gives him ass’s ears. Midas conceals his ears and binds the only witness, his prime minister Zopyrion, to silence; much humour ensues from Zopyrion’s struggles not to laugh at, or tell someone about, the ‘royal ears’. (There may be a hint of ministers’ duty not to laugh too openly at the much-­ satirized and similarly self-aggrandizing George IV, Prince Regent since 1811 and King since January 1820.) In Midas’s next encounter with a god, Bacchus rewards him for looking after his ‘foster-father’ Silenus by offering him whatever he wishes. Zopyrion thinks he should ask for the ass’s ears to be removed but instead, to Bacchus’ dismay (‘much I fear if you have not the ears/You have the judgement of an ass’ [2.102]) he chooses that everything he touches shall become gold. Briefly, Midas delights in this power but soon discovers its terrible disadvantages as his heavy gold cloak hurts his back and his bed, food

  Midas: A Drama in Two Acts 

179

and drink are transformed. He longs now for poverty. He sacrifices to Bacchus, who through an oracle tells him to bathe in the river Pactolus, transferring to it ‘The gold-transmuting power, which he repents’ (2.108). Midas rejects gold in all its forms and recovers his joy in nature, though a hint of his human fallibility remains in his clinging to his ear-concealing crown (2.109). The main source for the story of Midas is Ovid’s Metamorphoses XI. 92–193. In Ovid, however, the story of the golden touch comes before that of the ass’s ears. The reversal in Midas makes the king’s foolish judgement in the competition a prelude, rather than a coda, to the more memorable example of materialism. (Pascoe [2003], points out [p. 180] that the changed order also allows the act-break to come between the granting of Midas’s wish for the golden touch and its fulfilment: the stage can be transformed, turning ‘the quotidian earth tones of Midas’ world … into a glittering spectacular tableau’.) In Ovid Midas is cured of his desire for gold but he remains a fool (XI.148–9), whose story ends with the whispering reeds’ exposure of the buried secret of his ears. In Midas he is left with the ears but, purged of his material desires, ends in calm and content and makes an emphatic concluding speech rejecting ‘Man’s curse, heart-bartering, soul-enchaining gold’ (NSW 2.111). In Metamorphoses XI.146 ‘Hating wealth, he haunted the woods and fields’, but he has apparently learnt little and is about to misjudge Apollo; at the end of Midas, however, the king ‘turns to celebrate a pastoral world of simplicity and equality that might remind us of the values embraced at the end of ’ ∗Hunt’s The Descent of Liberty’ (Cox [1996], p. 257). Restoration to an ordered normality is also signalled by the echo of The Tempest in the last speech: Prospero drowns his book ‘deeper than did ever plummet sound’ (V.1.56–7) and Midas throws his gold ‘where no plummet’s line can sound the depth/Of greedy Ocean’ (NSW 2.110), the one giving up definitively his ‘rough magic’ (V.i.50) and the other his delusions of grandeur. Midas’ speech on the joys of gold and the power it brings (NSW 2.103–4) is, like the opening speech of Jonson’s Volpone, a hymn both to gold and to the speaker’s self. It may also recall the speech in which Luke gloats over gold and jewels in Massinger’s The City Madam (1632) IV.iii.1–32. For Richardson (1993), Midas’ soliloquy also has a contemporary resonance: his delight in ‘capital accumulation’ links to ‘the acquisitiveness of contemporary England, racing headlong into its new identity as an industrial, consumerized society financed by politics and mercantile imperialism’ (p.  131; Midas claims at NSW 2.104 that ‘India shall be mine’.) Midas is often paired with, or found complementary to, Proserpine. Richardson (1993), p.  131, identifies a linking theme in terms of Susan Gubar’s insight that ‘male domination in sexual relationships [in Proserpine]

180 M

becomes a synecdoche for a culture based on acquisition and brutality’ (Gubar [1979], p.  305). Cox (1996) usefully contrasts the male-dominated Midas with the female-dominated Proserpine: ‘a contest between male poets’ versus women’s ‘communal storytelling’; Midas wanting ‘to convert earthly things to gold’ while ‘the women … delight in the flowers of the earth’ [as does Midas himself once he is cured of his love of gold, NSW 2.109, 110]; one society ‘marked by egotism, greed, and strife’, the other valuing ‘community, gift-­ giving, and love’ (p.  258). Midas carries a strong moral but also has much more room than Proserpine for humour, most obviously in the portrayal of Zopyrion, a character considerably developed from the unnamed hair-cutting slave of Metamorphoses XI.182–9. If the work were staged there would be opportunities for such knockabout physical humour as Midas kicking his golden bed (stubbing his toe, no doubt) or his courtiers staggering under the weight of golden cloaks (2.107 stage direction; 2.104). Midas’ attempts to eat as his food turns to gold (2.106) might be played for laughs or in earnest, functioning, either way, as extreme evidence of the folly of the gift he asked from Bacchus. Even his final rejection of gold is comically extreme as he proclaims ‘Gilding … high treason’ and ‘The very name of gold … crime capital’ (2.110) or hails a little floating leaf ‘Thou art not gold’ (2.109). Richardson (1993) claims that Midas was right to reject Apollo’s song since ‘Gold belongs to him’ (2.110) and his song is ‘one of mastery and domination’ (p. 132). But the mastery is of such useful areas to humans as musical and poetic harmony, prophecy, medicine and light (2.95) and the fight against deceit and evil (2.94–5). Pan’s earthier song Richardson (p.  132) deems almost as ‘masculine’ as Apollo’s, including the rape motif (2.96). But this motif—pursuit of the nymph Syrinx—and Pan’s jauntily contemptuous attitude to his listeners surely do not suggest superiority to Apollo. Midas says that his ‘judgement is made up before I hear’ (2.94)—just as he will not pause and consider, as Bacchus wants him to, before choosing his gift (2.102). He is sent to sleep by Apollo’s ‘drowsy tune’ (2.96) and fails to register its moral content; still judging superficially, he values Pan’s piece for the ‘gay notes’ (2.97) which woke him up. One of the first things which struck him about the two gods was ‘the gold/That glitters on your silken robes’ (2.93). Whether or not he is right to reject Apollo, and whether or not PBS had this in mind when supplying the songs, the important point for MWS is how far Midas’ arrogance is shown in his belief that he can judge between the gods; later he sees himself as ‘akin to Gods’ (2.104) but his frustrated desire for food begins forcibly to remind him of his mortality (2.106). Richardson (pp. 132–3) may be right to see the opposition between Apollo and Bacchus as more significant than that between Apollo and Pan. Bacchus—who will

  Milnes, Richard Monckton (Lord Houghton) 

181

now be honoured even more than Pan (2.108)—frees Midas and it is as his devotee (2.110) that he ‘recovers his communal identity as shepherd-priestking’ at 2.108 (Richardson, p. 132). Further reading: Purinton (1999).

Milnes, Richard Monckton (Lord Houghton) (1809–1885) Author and politician. MWS knew him by December 1838 and saw him not only in ∗London but in ∗Paris in 1840, ∗Venice in 1842 and ∗Rome in 1843. She praises two love poems in his ‘Poetry for the People,’ and Other Poems (1840) (MWSL 3.10–11). Further reading: Bennett (1997b).

Milton, John (1608–1674) Epic poet and republican. His work had acquired classical status during the eighteenth century; MWS alludes to it frequently. In Lodore an account of the joyous reunion of Villiers and Ethel uses a quotation from Comus (A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1637) followed by seven from Paradise Lost (1667) Book Four to suggest how they are ‘“Imparadised” [IV.506] by each other’s presence’ (NSW 6.197–8). In The Last Man Lionel’s farewell to the former glories of humankind skilfuIly integrates references to Paradise Lost XII.641–5 and IX.432 (NSW 4.252). For some other of the many references to Milton’s poems see MWSJ 91, LL 4.102n. and NSW 2.296 (‘Lycidas’, 1638), NSW 8.115, 210, 282 (‘Il Penseroso’, 1645), MWSJ 62, 319–20 and NSW 2.296 (Paradise Regained, 1671), MWSJ 411–12 (Samson Agonistes, 1671). For her reading of his prose works between 1815 and 1821, including Areopagitica (1644) and The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643) see MWSJ 662–3. The Fall narrative is central to Frankenstein, itself a story of creation and fall. The first edition has an epigraph from Paradise Lost X.743–5: ‘Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay/To mould me man? Did I solicit thee/ From darkness to promote me?’ (NSW 1.3; see also 1.98). In reading the poem the creature is arrested by comparisons between himself and both Adam and Satan, whom he often ‘considered … the fitter emblem of my condition’ (NSW 1.97) and he warns Frankenstein ‘I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed’ (NSW

182 M

1.74). By the end, Frankenstein is ‘like the archangel who aspired to omnipotence … chained in an eternal hell’ and the creature sees, in his decline from ‘sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness’, how ‘the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil’ (NSW 1.161, 169). His ‘Evil thenceforth became my good’ (NSW 1.168) adapts Paradise Lost IV.110. The reader sees Adam and Satan as ‘both opposite and complementary’; and Frankenstein is like ‘Adam in his curiosity and ambition, like God in his capacity to create’ (Newlyn [1993], p. 86). In the second half of the novel, Newlyn adds, Frankenstein becomes ‘a confused, partly unsympathetic, and wholly tyrannical God, where before he was a curious Adam (though with occasional Satanic overtones). The monster, meanwhile, is at once an Adam to be admired and a Satan to be pitied’ (p. 135). From his point of view there is no good answer to the question asked in the epigraph; arguably the whole basis of Christianity is queried. For Smith (2016c) the references to Paradise Lost ‘indicate that the world of Frankenstein is a post-lapsarian, post-idealistic one’ (p. 76). Gilbert and Gubar (1979) read both Frankenstein and the creature as figures of Milton’s Eve (pp. 230–46). Zonana (1991) sees this representation of Eve less as the ‘unconscious manifestation’ of Gilbert and Gubar than ‘as a literary construction, drawing upon, and expanding into narrative, Mary ∗Wollstonecraft’s imaging of the fate of women denied the exercise of their reason and the cultivation of their souls’ (p. 175).

Mirabeau, Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de (1749–1791) French revolutionary orator and politician. In ‘Mirabeau’ MWS engages closely with his turbulent life. There are accounts of his continual persecution by his father, frequent imprisonment, adventures for love, tumultuous welcome by ‘the population of Provence’ (French Lives, LL 3.409) and decisive addresses to the National Assembly in the early stages of the ∗French Revolution. He is seen as a victim of the injustice inherent in the ancien régime of which he is a hereditary member but bold opponent. Imprisonment, and ‘the knowledge that others whose crimes were often their virtues, were his fellow-sufferers, lighted up a horror of despotism in his heart’ (LL 3.399). He maintained, however, an independent position supportive of a reformed monarchy (LL 3.423). The mostly favourable interpretation of Mirabeau’s conduct is influenced by sources including Lucas Montigny’s Mémoires biographiques … de Mirabeau

  ‘Modern Italian Romances’ 

183

(1824) and ∗Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution (1837). (See LL 3.xxi.) MWS partially exonerates Mirabeau from charges of venality, as, more whole-­ heartedly, does Carlyle (see LL 3.xxi and 422 note e).

‘Modern Italian Romances’ Anonymous essay in The Monthly Chronicle for November and December 1838, written probably in August or September that year (LL 4.lvii). For clear evidence of MWS’s authorship, see LL 4.lvii and Crook (1999), pp. 417–21. She argues that the Italian love of liberty has been much undervalued, but that Italians, including their authors, must make stronger efforts if they are to achieve freedom from Austrian and papal rule. She discusses novels by ∗Manzoni, Massimo d’Azeglio (1798–1866) and Ernesto Capocci di Belmonte (1798–1864). These are useful, moral works but ‘not marked by a spirit of fervid patriotism’ (LL 4.245), unlike more incendiary ‘romances dictated by hatred of the oppressor, and an ardent desire to awaken a love of freedom among the Italians’ (4.245) such as those of Francesco Guerrazzi (1804–1873). A similar division is put forward in ∗Mazzini’s anonymous article in The London and Westminster Review XI (1837), from which ‘Modern Italian Romances’ ‘takes ‘much of its cue’ while clearly considering, unlike Mazzini, that romance is ‘a more effective way of enlarging the sympathies of British readers’ than history (LL 4.lviii).

‘Modern Italy’ Review, in The Westminster Review for July 1829, of Henry Digby Beste’s Italy as It is (1828) and Louis Simond’s A Tour in Italy and Sicily (1828). (In the Westminster, the piece is untitled and anonymous.) Beste fails to describe Italian scenery and his views are warped by his desire to defend Roman ∗Catholicism (NSW 2.185)—‘tiaras, red-stockinged cardinals … pardons, priestcraft and simony’ (186). He ‘reveres’ the Austrian regime as well as the Pope (186). His opinions on works of art are whimsical and unimaginative (185–6). Simond too is weak on art and his book is not ‘of strong political tendency’ (194); essentially MWS ‘categorizes him as a tourist’, lacking the taste ‘achieved only by the sophisticated traveller or Anglo-Italian’ (Schoina [2009], p. 84). But on the whole, MWS greatly prefers his work to Beste’s: it is ‘unpretending’, ‘manly in its style, extensive in its information, amusing from its variety, and just in its conclusions’ (187).

184 M

MWS apologizes to ∗Bowring on 13 August 1828 for not yet having sent him the review: ‘the spirit did not move me … Unluckily I cannot write when I am not impelled by my subject’ (Bennett [1997b], p. 62).

Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) (1622–1673) Comic playwright. MWS first read him in November 1817 and April 1818 (MWSJ 184, 203; see also MWSL 1.32). In ‘Molière’, she claims that ‘Of all French writers he is the least merely French. His dramas belong to all countries and ages; and, as if as a corollary to this observation, we find, also, an earnestness of feeling, and a deep tone of passion in his character, that raises him above our ordinary notions of Gallic frivolity’ (French Lives, LL 3.1). She likes the freedom of his work from the neoclassical restrictions observed by most of his French contemporaries and sympathizes with his struggle to overcome political and religious obstacles to the performance of his work. She praises him also for his financial and professional generosity and for his loyalty (LL 3.45–6). Some of his best plays seize ‘as it were on the bared inner kernel of some fashionable vanity’ and give it its true name (LL 3.18). The main sources for the life are Jules-Antoine Taschereau’s Histoire de la vie et des ouvrages de Molière (1825) and ∗Scott’s review of it, first published in The Foreign Quarterly Review in 1828 (LL 3.xiii).

‘Monody on the Death of William Godwin’ Poem sometimes attributed to MWS. Markley in LL 4.xci n.100 concludes from examination of the manuscript that it ‘was evidently sent by an unknown author as a posthumous elegy’.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de (1533–1592) Essayist. PBS read Montaigne’s Essais (1580), at least sometimes aloud, in autumn 1816; MWS was reading him in 1818 and 1819 and she mentions him again in 1822 (MWSJ 136, 141–5, 195–6, 222–3, 235–45, 253–5, 406). She read his Voyage en Italie probably in about 1819 or 1820 (LL 2.liv). ‘Montaigne’ in French Lives (which draws mainly on these works) contrasts

  Monti, Vincenzo 

185

‘religionists in arms [in the French civil wars] with the tranquil philosopher, who dissected human nature in his study, and sounded the very depths of all our knowledge in freedom and ease, because he abstained from certain watchwords, and had no desire for proselytes or popular favour’ (LL 2.309–10). But she felt he undervalued the Reformation: see Religion.

Monti, Vincenzo (1754–1828) Italian poet and dramatist. MWS read several of his plays in 1818 (MWSJ 210, 226). A main concern of ‘Monti’ in Italian Lives is his ‘want of political integrity, and ready worship of ruling powers’ (LL 1.300). ‘Every fresh victory, every new conquest [of ∗Napoleon] was a theme for the venal muse of Monti’ (313); after Napoleon’s fall he remembered his motivation as fear but in fact it was ‘the slavish worship of success, which is too naturally inherent in human beings’ (314). MWS also considers Monti’s committed involvement in the debate on the questione della lingua—which form of Italian should be standard (318–22). Apart from the editions and other written works used for ‘Monti’ (for which see LL 1.lv), MWS may have drawn on oral testimony by ∗Byron, who met him in Milan in October 1816 and was similarly displeased by his political changeability. (See BLJ 5.119, 7.151–2; MWS quotes Monti’s impression of Byron at LL 1.323).

Moon MWS figures in PBS’s Epipsychidion line 281 as ‘the cold chaste Moon’. Perhaps partly in order to embrace and atone for the negative associations of this description, she identified, after his death, with the moon or moonshine. With him there may have been ‘something sunny’ about her but now she is ‘truly cold moonshine’ (MWSL 1.284); ‘moonshine—that is the name they give me’ and if PBS may now inhabit the moon she exists, like moonshine, only ‘through his influence glimmering on the earth, known & sought through the light he bestows upon me’ (MWSJ 436). Rambles ends with the moon hanging ‘luminous, a pendant sphere of silver fire’ over Sorrento (NSW 8.386)—perhaps here an assertion of a more independent identity. In 1820–1822, she uses a ‘sunburst symbol’ (MWSJ 580) to represent CC.

186 M

Moore, Thomas (1779–1852) Poet, author of Irish Melodies. When MWS met him in 1824 (see MWSL 1.505 and n.6) she had read works by him including Intercepted Letters; or, The Twopenny Post-Bag (1813) (MWSJ 180), Lalla Rookh: an Oriental Romance (1817) (MWSJ 172; for some later references see NSW 6.183, 233, 274, 7.209), and The Fudge Family in Paris (1818) (MWSJ 230). (The similarities between so-called Colonel Robert Finch in Italy and so-called Colonel Calicot in Fudge became a running joke [MWSJ 260 and n.4; MWSL 1.210 and n.11].) Later she often quotes his lyric poems, including ‘They are gone’, ‘Where is the slave’ and ‘As Slow our Ship’ (NSW 5.93, 287, 6.298). She also expressed delight with his History of Ireland (MWSL 3.116). She probably did not, however, write an 1832 review, attributed to her, of his The Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald (see NSW 1.239). MWS contributed substantially to Moore’s Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (1830) and The Works of Lord Byron: with his Letters and Journals (1832–1835): she pressed people she knew for information and letters, gave Moore information and anecdotes about his life in ∗Switzerland and ∗Italy, wrote notes, and wrote down what she could remember of the Memoirs burned before Moore could copy extracts (see Moore [1983–1991], pp. 1031, 1037). In the process, she came to know him well. In summer 1827 she says that ‘He reminds me delightfully of the past’, that his warmth and genuineness redeem him ‘from the sin of worldliness with which he has been charged’, that—in a time of loneliness and sadness—‘I can talk with more freedom to him than to anyone almost I ever knew—He seems to understand & to like me’ (MWSJ 501). He found her, in 1824, ‘very gentle and feminine’ (Moore [2013], vol. 4, p. 220) and told her that he believed she delighted in doing him kindness (Moore [1964], vol. 2, p. 612). The friendship gave her at least a glimpse of ‘the style of society’ from which she had been exiled (MWSJ 502). She trusted him enough to tell him about the problems in her friendship with Jane ∗Williams and, on his advice, to confront her about her disloyalty in February 1828 (MWSJ 506). Conversely she was able to reassure him, in 1839, that PBS—about whom, as well as Byron, she told him much—liked his work (MWSL 2.308). He was somewhat riled when in January 1830 she objected to his coverage of PBS’s atheism (Moore [1964], vol. 2, pp. 681–2) but his response was influenced by his being confessedly ‘in a twitter’ about the reception of his book (p. 682) (Full understanding of the relationship is limited, however, because, as MWSL 1.554n. points out, we have many of his letters to her and only fragments of hers to him.) Moore became more distant

  Morgan, Sydney, Lady 

187

once the work on Byron was complete, but they continued to correspond until at least 1844 and to meet socially. Further reading: Feldman (1980); Kelly (2008).

Morgan, Sydney, Lady (1778?–1859) Irish novelist and writer on ∗France and ∗Italy, Sydney Owenson until her marriage to Sir Thomas Morgan in 1812. MWS read her O’Donnel: a National Tale (1814) in October 1816, The Missionary: an Indian Tale (1811) and The Wild Irish Girl (1806) in September 1817, France (1817) in December 1817 and Florence Macarthy: an Irish Tale (1818) in March 1822 (MWSJ 141, 180, 188, 401). For the possible influence on Frankenstein of the ardent Hilarion in The Missionary see Neff (1997), p. 394. In 1829 MWS speaks scathingly of Morgan’s The Book of the Boudoir (1829): she ‘writes many things, not because they are true, but because they have come into her head’ and here she vilifies ‘a poet’s love’ (NSW 2.197). She seems, however, to have become more favourably disposed to Morgan having met her, through ∗Godwin, in March 1835 (MWSL 2.242 n.1), before she moved permanently from Dublin to ∗London in 1837. Italy (1821) is praised in Rambles as an exception to the prevailing contemptuous tone taken by writers and travellers (NSW 8.66).

‘The Mortal Immortal: a Tale’ Story published in November 1833 in The Keepsake for MDCCCXXXIV as the work of ‘the Author of “Frankenstein”’. The first-person narrative begins on Winzy’s 324th birthday. (Robinson in CT 390 suggests that ‘Winzy’ derives from Scottish ‘winze’ meaning ‘curse’ and so emphasizes ‘the tragic curse of eternal life’.) He tells how as a young man he worked for Cornelius ∗Agrippa, hoping to earn enough money to win his beloved, if somewhat coquettish, Bertha. Cornelius, leaving Winzy to supervise his ‘chemical preparations’ while he sleeps, warns him not to drink a liquid which he tells him is ‘a philter [sic] to cure love’ (CT 222). Angry that Bertha has tormented him by apparently encouraging his rival, Albert Hoffer, Winzy does drink. Bertha’s rich protectress (seen with her page and Bertha in the Keepsake engraving by Frederick Bacon after Henry P. Briggs) wants her to marry Albert but she now deserts the protectress and marries Winzy. Instead

188 M

of a love-cure the potion turns out to be ‘a divine elixir, which … had inspired me with courage and resolution’ (CT 224) and which, Winzy learns, brings immortality or at least unageing longevity. Over the years he remains young while Bertha’s beauty fades and she becomes acutely aware of the difference between them. People shun the couple, fearing that Winzy must have had dealings with Cornelius’ ‘supposed [diabolical] friends’ (CT 227). Bertha becomes ‘bed-rid and paralytic’ (229) and when she dies her husband loses ‘all that really bound me to humanity’ (229). He lives on, his loneliness emphasized by his failure to name other people after her time, still fearing death ‘even while I abhor life’ (229). On the day he tells his story he determines to go on an expedition, ‘warring with the powers of frost in their home—beset by famine, toil, and tempest’, during which he will perish or from which he will return as ‘the wonder and benefactor of the human species’ (230); in the second case he will then kill himself. In this final scheme there are evident reminders of Frankenstein and of Walton (NSW 1.154–9, 9–12, 163–4). The desire for glory further stresses the theme of the pointlessness and unnaturalness of immortality, which brings Winzy no greater contentment than Bertha gains from her attempts to cover the ravages of time with ‘rouge, youthful dress, and assumed juvenility of manner’ (CT 228). (‘Did not I myself wear a mask?’ he adds [228].) On the other hand, that Winzy should dread extinction and desire to be remembered as much as his fellow mortals seems natural: he is a ‘mortal’ immortal, not only because he may still be subject to eventual death, but also because he is human and fallible rather than god-like. One can compare Winzy, in his isolation, not only to Frankenstein but to his creature or to Lionel Verney, who also sets off on an expedition that may prove hopeless at the end of The Last Man. ∗Southey’s ballad ‘Cornelius Agrippa’ (1799) is a probable source for the story of ‘the scholar, who unawares raised the foul fiend during his master’s absence’ (CT 219), and ∗Godwin’s St Leon for the elixir. Other sources or analogues include Frances Sheridan’s The History of Nourjahad (1767) (Robinson [1975], pp.  26–7n.; Nourjahad is mentioned in the tale, CT 219) and E.T.A. ∗Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ or ‘The Devil’s Elixirs’—the former was well known in England by 1833 and the latter was reviewed in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1824 (Hoeveler [1997], pp. 155, 163 n.11). Hoeveler (1997) sees Winzy as ‘the idealized masculine component of Mary Shelley—her reason and her intellect—that she desperately wants to believe will provide a means of escape’ from ‘the biological curse’. But her feminine aspect ‘lives in the figure of Bertha, the female body that rots and decays …’; the male body endures, ‘a perfect emblem of the triumph of mas-

  Mounseer Nongtongpaw; or, The Discoveries of John Bull in a Trip to Paris 

189

culinity and masculine values over the feminine’ (p.  159). Roberts (1990) discusses Winzy as ‘a Shelleyan figure who haunts the author as a vision of perpetual youth and symbol of immortal genius’ (p. 92). Iginio Ugo Tarchetti (1839–1869) published an Italian version of ‘The Mortal Immortal’ in 1868. Further reading: Hofkosh (1993).

 ounseer Nongtongpaw; or, The Discoveries M of John Bull in a Trip to Paris Poem formerly attributed to Mary Godwin (MWS), published in the ∗Juvenile Library in January or February 1808. It revises and expands a comic song by Charles Dibdin (1745–1814) in which John Bull, whose questions about Paris are answered ‘Je vous n’entends pas’, concludes that everything is owned by one ‘Mounseer Nongtongpaw’. In a letter of 2 January 1808 ∗Godwin says that he is enclosing ‘two scribbles’ (no longer extant) modelled on the original song, one ‘the production of my daughter in her eleventh year’ (Sunstein [1996], p. 19.) The published revision, perhaps partly based on the ten-year-­ old’s sketch, is probably by John Taylor. Moskal in NSW 8.398 sees the work, nevertheless, as significant as ‘an essentially collaborative event’, as MWS’s writing was often later to be, and in tune with her later ‘self-distancing from English insularity and chauvinism, and the importance she attached to the acquisition of living languages’.

‘The Mourner’ Story ‘by the author of Frankenstein’ published in November 1829  in The Keepsake for MDCCCXXX. It opens with an extensive description of the scene engraved by Robert Wallis from J.M.W. Turner’s painting of Virginia Water, near ∗Windsor. Horace Neville shows his betrothed, Juliet, a grave in Old Windsor churchyard and the following day, back at Virginia Water, tells her the story of his relationship with the woman buried there. Maltreated while a boy at ∗Eton, Horace ran away and, after a time hiding in woodland, was helped by a kind but intensely melancholy young woman, Ellen Burnet. He continued to visit her in her cottage at Bishopsgate and dissuaded her from suicide. Her concealed history and identity were eventually revealed when Horace met Lewis Elmore, son of the Earl of D--.  Lewis’s fiancée, Clarice Elmore, disappeared after the loss of the ship on which she and her beloved

190 M

father, Lord Elmore, were returning from Barbados; she blamed herself for his death after saving her and after she had for a long time refused to be separated from him. Months later, the sight of a miniature reveals to Horace that Clarice and Ellen are one and the same. The two men rush to Bishopsgate but find that Ellen/Clarice has died, leaving a letter for Horace with words also for Lewis. She had seen herself as a parricide but ‘Sickness and near death have taken the sting from my despair’ (CT 98) and she is now at peace: Providence ‘has snapt the heavy chain binding me to unutterable sorrow’ (99). Charles E. Robinson lists among MWS’s ‘stock fictional elements’ here ‘a hero patterned on her husband … an orphaned heroine who intensely loved her father … a death at sea; a plot determined by uncertainty and mystery’ (CT 378–9). Chatterjee (2007) suggests reading the story ‘intertextually with the unpublished Mathilda as the published acknowledgment of the punishment that Mathilda feels she deserves for her secret crime of desiring the father’s death’ (p. 35). The setting draws not only on Turner but on MWS’s personal knowledge of the Windsor area from her time living in Bishopsgate and ∗Marlow and a ten-day visit in 1825. Further reading: Ellis (1993); Hoeveler (2005); McKeever (1999).

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756–1791) ‘[T]his greatest of all composers’ (NSW 8.245); according to Lionel Verney in The Last Man ‘you enter into the passions expressed by him, and are transported with grief, joy, anger, or confusion, as he, our soul’s master, chooses to inspire’ (NSW 4.108). MWS went to Le nozze di Figaro (1786) three times and Don Giovanni (1787) four times in London in 1817–1818 (MWSJ 161, 170, 192, 194, 195, 196) and gives detailed accounts of productions of both operas in 1823 (MWSL 1.427). Mozart pieces often featured in musical evenings at the ∗Novellos’. Allusions to Mozart come easily to MWS. She imagines singing ‘Notte e giorno faticar’ from Don Giovanni with the Hunts (MWSL 1.353) and thinks of ∗Byron’s servant Fletcher as the Don’s Leporello (MWSL 1.437), probably implying also the not uncommon identification of their masters. Don Giovanni is significant also for the characters in The Last Man, where Raymond sings in the trio ‘Ah taci ingiusto core’, softening ‘arch entreaty … into tenderness’ and reminding Perdita painfully of his old love for her; ‘Porgi, amor, qualche ­ristoro’ in Figaro, where ‘the deserted Countess laments

  Murchison, Charlotte and Roderick Impey 

191

the change of the faithless Almaviva’ ends by breaking Perdita’s composure completely (NSW 4.108–9). Further reading: Palacio 305–9.

Murchison, Charlotte and Roderick Impey (1788–1869) and (1792–1871) Roderick Murchison (knighted 1846, baronet 1866) was well known as a geologist; Charlotte Murchison was actively involved in his fieldwork and research and illustrated his The Silurian System (1839). MWS socialized with the couple in the early 1830s (MWSJ 518; MWSL 2.127–8) and she mentions Roderick Murchison again in 1838 (MWSL 2.298). MYR 8.248 n.2. notes that the Murchisons introduced her to ‘a set of Tory literary figures, including Theodore Hook … and John Gibson Lockhart’, but seem ‘not to have included [her] in later social gatherings’.

Murray, John (1778–1843) Publisher (John Murray ‘II’), associated especially with ∗Byron. He considered publishing Frankenstein in 1817 (see MWSJ 171, MWSL 1.36 and n.8 and MYR 9.lxxxvi). He also rejected Valperga in 1823 (see Foscolo, Ugo) and Perkin Warbeck in 1829 (see MWSL 2.89 and n.1) and did not take up her many suggestions for books in 1829 and 1830 (MWSL 2.89, 113–14, 115). She did work for him indirectly (if extensively) on ∗Moore’s Byron volumes but was reluctant to accept payment; nevertheless in December 1829 Murray succeeded in giving her £100 ‘for various contributions’ (see Seymour 353). For Murray’s travel handbooks, compiled by John Murray III (1808–1892) and others, see Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843.

Music Music was for MWS ‘a passion not a pastime’ (Palacio 305). It is ‘the Master key’ to the doors of her heart (MWSL 1.352). In her unhappy life in England in 1823 it has ‘filled me, raised me to heaven & given me freedom’; when listening to it ‘I may dream of grand ideas—I may see scenes which may enchant me—I may either think of the past, or the future, such as I would

192 M

have it—or I will arrange … some wondrous tale of combinations of man’s thoughts & passions’ (MWSJ 469–70; compare Euthanasia’s extended speech in praise of music in Valperga, NSW 3.248). Mathilda’s harp has a more simply therapeutic effect (NSW 2.13, 45). MWS celebrates Italian opera in ∗London in ‘A Visit to Brighton’ (NSW 2.164–5). She saw and heard much ∗Mozart and was ‘converted’ to Haydn by ∗Novello (MWSL 1.408); on Haydn see also The Last Man, NSW 4.325–6. Allegri’s Miserere and Lamentations in the Sistine Chapel prompt reflections, in Rambles, on how the torture of grief and lamentation, ‘if idealized—elevated by the imagination—married harmoniously to sound or colour’, is turned ‘to happiness; inspiring adoration; and a tremulous but ardent aspiration for immortality’ (NSW 8.352). See also: Paganini, Nicolò; Pasta, Giuditta; Rossini, Gioachino; Velluti, Giovanni-Battista; Weber, Carl Maria von.

N

Naples The Shelleys and CC lived at 250 Riviera di Chiaia between December 1818 and February 1819. They visited local sites including ∗Pompeii, Baiae (Baia), and Vesuvius. MWS expresses her hopes for the (temporarily successful) Neapolitan Revolution of 1820 in MWSL 1.156. MWS returned to the Bay of Naples, staying mainly at Sorrento, between May and July 1843 (see Rambles, NSW 8.368–70, 374–6, 386). ‘Naples is the real enchantress of Italy’, its scenery, antiquities and climate so admirable ‘that a festive appearance seems for ever to invest it, mingled strangely in the feeling of insecurity with which one is inspired by the sight of Vesuvius’ (‘Recollections of Italy’, CT 28). Associations with ∗Petrarch, ∗Boccaccio and ∗Virgil enhance the ‘truly poetic’ nature of the site (‘Garcilaso de la Vega’, Spanish Lives [LL 2.48]). The Bay is a setting in The Last Man (NSW 4.5–9) and in ‘Valerius: the Reanimated Roman’.

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) French general, First Consul from 1799 and Emperor Napoleon I 1804–1814 and 1815. Many of MWS’s liberal contemporaries viewed him with mixed admiration and horror, as either fulfilling or destroying the principles of the ∗French Revolution. She, however, was more consistently critical.

© The Author(s) 2019 M. Garrett, The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Palgrave Literary Dictionaries, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56639-3_14

193

194 N

Franklin (2013) persuasively cites a number of allusions to, or reflections of, Napoleon in Frankenstein. For example Frankenstein’s last journey can be seen as a symbol of Napoleon’s ‘nemesis’ in his 1812 retreat from ∗Russia and the ‘Herculean’, fast moving creature, ‘made out of the corpses of those who went before him’, as an image of the Imperial Army of ‘peasant recruits’ who look to him as ‘a father and protector of the ideals of the original revolution’ (pp. 36, 43). Napoleon’s dangerous glamour is entangled with ∗Byron’s; in The Last Man, MWS agonizes, with reference to Lord Raymond, that ‘Byronism threatened to taint newly-emerging liberation movements of ∗Italy and ∗Greece with the hero-worship and militarism of the defeated Napoleon’ (Franklin [2013], p. 45). Napoleon’s despotism is a preoccupation of ‘Monti’ and ‘Ugo Foscolo’ (Italian Lives) and ‘Madame de Staël’ (French Lives). Liberty for him meant ‘a free scope to the exercise of his own will’; given that, he could achieve some good, but ‘but when his measures were obstructed’ he tyrannically crushed both nation and individuals (’Monti’, LL 1.305). People regarded him with ‘wonder and admiration’ as ‘an incarnation of the memories of antiquity’, but in practice ‘little good arose from the breaking up of the ancient tyrannies’; ‘the indomitable will of one man was enforced by means of treachery and slaughter’ (LL 1.314). Staël’s ‘crime was that she would not celebrate the liberticide in her writings’ (LL 3.482). He could cope with her influence ‘only … by trampling it in the dust; and she found in him a man unimpressible by words or sentiments … and wholly indifferent to the thousands to be mowed down or the one tortured by the methods he used for his success’ (LL 3.476). (For the crimes which ‘cast a dark stain on Napoleon’s name’ see also Rambles, NSW 8.98). MWS attended Napoleon’s reburial in Les Invalides in Paris on 15 December 1840 (see MWSL 3.19).

‘Necessity of a Belief in the Heathen Mythology to a Christian, The’ Notes and ideas for an essay or longer work comparing ‘Heathen’ and Judaeo-­ Christian mythology and revelation, often to the disadvantage of the Bible. LL 4.liii–iv argues for a date in 1820. LL 4.liv notes that ‘the title alludes playfully to P.B. Shelley’s famous “The Necessity of Atheism” [1811] but it is as Godwinian as it is Shelleyan’.

  Niccolini, Giovanni Battista 

195

Niccolini, Giovanni Battista (1782–1861) Poet, playwright and advocate of Italian unification. MWS discusses his work in Rambles (NSW 8.335–7).

Nicknames, Mary Shelley’s Particularly in the first years of her relationship with PBS, he and ∗Hogg called MWS, and she called herself, such pet names as ‘Maië’ or ‘Maie’, ‘Pecksie’ and ‘Dormouse’: see for example MWSJ 55, MWSL 1.11–14. PBS writes in the journal endpapers ‘The Maie & her Elfin Knight’ (MWSJ 80); the lady of the Elfin Knight is called May in some ballads and MWS sometimes calls PBS ‘sweet Elf ’ (MWSJ 80n.). (Other names used in her circle include ‘Albe’ for ∗Byron and Constantia for CC.) PBS’s ‘Ozymandias’ was first published on 11 January 1818 under the Greek name ‘Glirastes’— ‘Dormouse-lover’. Pecksie is ‘the industrious bird in Mrs Sherwood’s The History of the Robins’ (Crook [2000b], p. 1). For further Pecksie references see Shelley (2008), pp. 248 and 251 notes 55 and 95; and for a vigorous rebuttal of the idea that such references should be considered patronizing, Mercer (2016). MWS signs some early letters to the Hunts ‘Marina’ (MWSL 1.33, 35), as again for a time when writing to them from ∗Italy (MWSL 1.139, 164, 173, 190). Seymour 182 suggests this combines Mary and Marianne (∗Hunt). It could equally refer to Marina in ∗Shakespeare’s Pericles or have some connection with the sea—Roe (2005) says ‘a spirit of the water’ (p. 300). When they lived together near Genoa, apparently, the Hunts called her ‘Grandmamma’ or ‘Grandmother’ (for instance MWSL 1.352,357, 358, 364, 365, 413) with reference to her ‘care and concern for the birth of Vincent and the welfare of Marianne Hunt’ (MWSL 1.353 n.2).

‘A Night Scene’ Poem by ‘Mary S.’ published in November 1830  in The Keepsake for MDCCCXXXI; for evidence of MWS’s authorship see Palacio 482–3 and LL 4.xxxiv. The speaker cannot see her ‘gentlest Isabel’ in the ‘Ambrosial night’, sensing only by the touch of her hand, her sighs and ‘the fragrance of thy

196 N

silken hair’ (LL 4.134). The ‘drear blank suggests a thousand fears’ for which the remedy is a kiss ‘upon my night-cool brow’ (4.135). The poem, which is probably addressed to Isabel ∗Robinson, ‘stands out among Mary Shelley’s lyrics for the expressiveness of its erotic feeling’ (LL 4.xxxiv).

Nogaret, François-Félix (1740–1831) Author of Le Miroir des événemens actuels, ou La Belle au plus offrant: Histoire à deux visages (1790). Here an inventor called Wak-wik-vauk-on-son-­ frankénsteïn, or later simply Frankénsteïn, creates a mechanical flautist. The inventor’s original name refers partly to Jacques Vaucanson (1709–1782), maker of automata; ‘frankénsteïn’ perhaps (Douthwaite [2012], p. 254 n.52) derives from the legends of ∗Dippel. Le Miroir is a possible source for, or at least an interesting analogue and contrast to, Frankenstein. Douthwaite (2012) explores Nogaret’s faith, in 1790, in ‘the triumph of science over superstition’ (p. 60) – automata ‘whose function is to help their creators find a wife and, by extension, to aid in the establishment of a secular and prosperous society’ (p.  96)—in contrast with MWS’s ‘post-Waterloo dystopia’ which ‘struggles mightily over the potential of collaboration between humans and humanoids and the political hopes that it incarnates’ (p. 91).

Norton, Caroline (1808–1877) Poet, novelist, editor and campaigner for the rights of married women. She was Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s granddaughter. Her separation from her husband, George Norton, entailed much public notoriety; in June 1836 he brought to court an unsuccessful case for ‘criminal conversation’—adultery— between his wife and the prime minister, Lord Melbourne, and he refused her access to her children. MWS knew Caroline Norton by 1834 or earlier (MWSJ 614) and in October 1835 told ∗Trelawny ‘I never saw a woman I thought so fascinating - Had I been a man I should certainly have fallen in love with her’ (MWSL 2.256). In 1836 MWS expressed sympathy and support for Norton in her difficult, semi-ostracized social situation (see MWSJ 615); beyond Norton’s family circle she ‘was one of the few women in whom she could confide the pain of the loss of her children’ (Atkinson [2012], pp. 285–6). She

  Novello, Vincent 

197

was credited by Norton (see MWSL 2.283 n.3) with enabling her ‘materially’ to improve a passage in her Observations on the Natural Claim of the Mother to the Custody of her Infant Children … (1837). In 1840 MWS was keen to read her ‘The Dream’, and other Poems (MWSL 3.8 and n.12).

Novello, Vincent (1781–1861) Musician, composer and publisher. MWS met him probably for the first time in March 1818 (MWSJ 196 and n.4), found him kind and very likeable (MWSL 1.398) and enthusiastically attended musical evenings at his house in 1823–1824. She ended the friendship in March 1828 in response to scandalous rumours about their relationship, but remained in contact with Novello and his wife Mary Sabilla Novello (1789–1854) and may have visited them in Nice in 1849 or 1850 (see Crook [2013], p. 42).

O

‘Oh listen while I sing to thee’ Love poem linking the joy, passion, faintness or ending of song with the truth, distance or falseness of the lover addressed. The manuscript is dated 12 March 1838 and the piece was set, with some verbal changes, by ∗Pearson in ‘O Listen While I Sing to Thee. Canzonet. With Accompaniment for the Harp or Piano Forte’. The date of the canzonet is probably 1843 or 1844: see LL 4.149.

Ollier, Charles (1788–1859) Publisher, editor and literary adviser. He and his brother James (1795/1796–1851) published works by PBS and Leigh ∗Hunt and co-­ published HSWT. The business failed in 1823; Ollier worked for ∗Colburn from about 1825, Colburn and Bentley from 1829, and ∗Bentley from 1832–1839. MWS had frequent dealings with him, particularly in connection with her books brought out by these publishers: The Last Man, Perkin Warbeck, the 1831 Frankenstein, and Lodore.

© The Author(s) 2019 M. Garrett, The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Palgrave Literary Dictionaries, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56639-3_15

199

200 O

‘On Ghosts’ Essay in the London Magazine for March 1824, signed ‘Σς’ (Ss). In this ‘playfully morose anatomy of horror-fiction’ (Webster-Garrett [2007], p.  58) MWS wonders whether, in an age of increased knowledge, people still believe in ghosts; it is easier to dismiss the idea in daylight than if you read a ghost story at midnight in an eerie setting. Our fear still ‘suggests something beyond us of which we are ignorant’ (NSW 2.143). She recounts the experiences of two people who claim to have seen ghosts—∗Hogg’s and ∗Mengaldo’s encounters with dead friends, first recorded in MWSJ 54–5 (by PBS) and 231–2. There follows ∗Lewis’s brief tale, ‘not probably so authentic as these, but perhaps more amusing’ (NSW 2.145), of the funeral of the ‘king of the cats’ and another cat’s realization that he is now king, as noted by PBS in MWSJ 129. The cat coda perhaps undermines the seriousness of the other two accounts, or further problematizes what, or who, to believe.

‘On Reading Wordsworth’s Lines on Peel Castle’ Poem extant in two manuscript versions, both dated 8 December 1825 (see LL 4.xxxii and 128–9). ∗Wordsworth’s ‘Elegiac Stanzas, Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm, Painted by Sir George Beaumont’ was published in 1807. LL 4.xxxi points out that both poets have lost a loved one at sea— Wordsworth’s brother John and PBS—and notes the lack of consolation in MWS’s poem compared with Wordsworth’s.

‘Orpheus’ Dramatic poem, written probably in early 1821, concerning Orpheus after his failed attempt to bring Eurydice back from the underworld. Most of the piece was first published in 1862 and the whole in 1870. MWS’s fair copy and partial draft survive, with some corrections by PBS (BSM 12.14–27, 50–3; NSW 2.442–7). It remains uncertain how far ‘Orpheus’ is the work of MWS, PBS or both: for detailed discussion see PS 4.379–80. Palacio 467 and Crook in BSM 12.xli believe that MWS’s presence is stronger in lines 35–124. Ovid’s Metamorphoses (X and XI in this case) is the main source of Orpheus’ story, as of Proserpine and Midas. PS 4.380–2 examines the use of Ovid, ∗Virgil’s Georgics IV.453–525, and other sources. Conceivably the poem reconstructs, or relates to, an improvisation by ∗Sgricci (see PS 4.379–80).

  Owen, Robert Dale 

201

Owen, Robert Dale (1801–1877) Social reformer, son of the mill-owner and reformer Robert Owen (1771–1858) and associate of Frances ∗Wright. He was involved in the New Harmony community, founded by his father in 1825, and in Wright’s Nashoba. He met MWS in 1827. In Owen (1874) he remembers his surprise that she was not the ‘radical reformer’, ‘at war with the world’, whom he had expected in view of her ‘antecedents and surroundings’, but ‘Genial, gentle, sympathetic, thoughtful and matured in her opinions beyond her years’, liberal yet unprejudiced and ‘above all, womanly, in the best sense, in every sentiment and instinct; … a person with warm social feelings, dependant [sic] for happiness on loving encouragement’ (pp. 288–9). He also describes her personal appearance (see Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft) and wishes he had been restrained by her rather than ‘urged’ by the radical Wright (p. 290).

Oxford University city visited in late summer 1815 by MWS, PBS, Charles ∗Clairmont and ∗Peacock. They went to places including the Bodleian picture gallery and University College, from which PBS had been expelled in 1811, with ∗Hogg, for refusing to deny his authorship of ‘The Necessity of Atheism’. The intermediate draft of Frankenstein is satirical at the expense of the institution’s obsession with trivial rules and traditions; here students can come close to being expelled for wearing the wrong colour pantaloons (Shelley [2008], pp. 183–4)—a reason no more trivial, it is implied, than discrimination on religious grounds. The passage was removed at proof stage; the published text describes the ‘ancient and picturesque’ colleges and the Isis (Thames) which reflects the city’s ‘majestic assemblage of towers, and spires, and domes’, almost allowing Frankenstein to forget his bitter ‘memory of the past, and … anticipation of the future’ (NSW 1.123–4). Charles Clairmont, describing the visit in a tone similar to the Frankenstein draft, talks about the alchemical application of ‘the two most noted Infidels, Shelley and Hogg’ who had ‘pored over the artificial & natural boundaries of human knowledge’ (CC 1.14–15). Holmes 291 suggests that such talk—perhaps ‘something Shelley said’—was a source for MWS’s story of ‘an “infidel” student, working secretly in the heart of a respectable university, to bring forth a diabolic creation’.

202 O

The Bodleian Library holds an important collection of MWS manuscripts—among them her journals and the notebooks containing the Frankenstein intermediate draft and The Fields of Fancy (see Mathilda). Further reading: Hebron and Denlinger (2010a, b).

P

Pacchiani, Francesco (1771–1835) Professor of physics, and earlier of metaphysics and logic, at the university of ∗Pisa. MWS was initially impressed by his ‘spirito altissimo’, his eloquence and the purity of his Italian; the Pisans say he is mad and their stories make one think he is at least ‘eccentric’ (MWSL 1.163). Soon, however, she complains that ‘there is no truth in him—but a love of wealth and a boasting infinitely disgusting’ (MWSL 1.169, 177; see also 181 and 182). Pepi in Valperga (and possibly also Tripalda) is in part a portrait of Pacchiani (see NSW 3.xvi n.10; MWSJ 589).

Paganini, Nicolò (1784–1840) Italian virtuoso violinist and composer. MWS heard him at the King’s Theatre in ∗London in June 1831 and found his playing ‘sublime’ (MWSJ 522); she told Maria ∗Gisborne that he ‘threw [her] into hysterics’ (MWSL 2.210). But she had some misgivings about his achieving such effects while ‘playing simply to attract admiration and gain money’ (Rambles, NSW 8.121).

© The Author(s) 2019 M. Garrett, The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Palgrave Literary Dictionaries, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56639-3_16

203

204 P

Paine, Thomas (1737–1809) Radical. Among the works read by MWS in March 1820 were his Common Sense (1776), The Age of Reason (1794–1795), and Rights of Man (1791–1792) (MWSJ 311–12).

Painting and Sculpture MWS particularly admired ancient sculpture (see for instance MWSJ 245, 252, MWSL 1.88–9) and the work of ∗Raphael, Titian and Guido Reni (including some pieces no longer attributed to him—see Palacio 568 n; NSW 2.127, 8.346–7). Partly under the influence of ∗Rio, she wrote much about art in Rambles—especially the collections and other displays in ∗Dresden, ∗Venice, ∗Florence and ∗Rome. Painters considered other than Raphael and Titian include Correggio, Salvator Rosa, Ghirlandaio and (following Rio— see Palacio 553–4) the soft, delicate but never insipid Fra Angelico (NSW 8.305). Among more modern artists, she finds Canova artificial compared with ancient sculptors (NSW 8.122, 277); modern sculptors and the Nazarenes—German painters of the 1840s praised by Rio (NSW 8.308 n.a)— are ‘good copyists, but … never original’ (NSW 8.307–8). MWS’s journals and letters include many other references to painting and sculpture. The painters James Northcote (1746–1831) and Sir Thomas ∗Lawrence were friends of her father; she rarely mentions J.M.W. Turner but was clearly familiar with his work (see NSW 8.273, 381; ‘The Mourner’; ‘The Sisters of Albano’). MWS comes closest to outlining a theory of art when, in volume 2 of Rambles, she expresses distrust of rules which restrict artists’ exercise of the imagination—so dissenting from Rio’s desire for them only to delineate ‘the conceptions of religious mysticism’ (NSW 8.307). ‘Those painters who can embody ideas conceived in their purest and most elevated contemplations, far removed from vulgar and trivial reality, are the greatest’ but it is not surprising that most artists, who are gifted by nature ‘to see and represent form and colour’ should ‘view in the perfection of representing the one or the other, the aim of their labours’ (NSW 8.308). For the more personal function of her discussion of art as ‘dream work’, where the scenes and expression of painted figures express or displace her own pain and grief, see Moskal (2001). See also: Michelangelo Buonarroti.

 Paracelsus 

205

Paracelsus (c.1493–1541) Name used by Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, Swiss medical scientist and mystic. Frankenstein imbibes his, Cornelius ∗Agrippa’s and Albertus Magnus’ (c.1200–1280) ‘wild fancies’ and diligently seeks, like Paracelsus, the ‘elixir of life’ and the end of all disease in humans (NWS 1.26 and n.a).

Paris MWS visited Paris in August 1814, May 1816, August 1823, spring 1828— when she caught smallpox but recovered in time to meet ∗Mérimée, Benjamin Constant, Lafayette and other writers and political figures—June 1840, October 1840–January 1841, August 1843, December 1843–January 1844 and autumn 1849. In Rambles she finds a ‘cheerfulness and lightsomeness’, ‘gaiety, animation, life’ lacking in ∗London (NSW 8.79). Paris is a setting in works including Valperga, The Last Man, Perkin Warbeck, and ‘Transformation’.

‘The Parvenue’ Tale first published in November 1836 in The Keepsake for MDCCCXXXVII. The author’s name is given as ‘Mrs. Shelley’, as in the reprints in The Amaranth; or, Token of Remembrance for 1848 and The Remember Me; a Token of Love for 1854 (published in Boston and Philadelphia respectively). In a plot less complicated than many of MWS’s Keepsake contributions, Lord Reginald Desborough marries the ‘untaught, low born, portionless’ Fanny (CT 268). They live abroad for two years, during which he sometimes reproves her for her preference for charitable giving over spending on herself. She has a deep ‘sort of instinct or sentiment of justice, the offspring of my lowly paternal hearth and my mother’s enlightened piety’ (269). Later the marriage fails because Fanny’s numerous relations make unreasonable financial demands of Lord Reginald. He asks her to choose between seeing him and them, and she cannot bring herself not to go to her beloved, ailing mother in Margate. (An earlier visit there is described so as to fit the Keepsake plate of vessels in a choppy sea off the town by Robert Brandard after Alfred Gomersal

206 P

Vickers.) Reginald refuses to reconcile with her after her parents’ death and, she later learns, ‘loves another, a high-born girl’ and ‘openly curses our union as the obstacle to his happiness’ (274). She will emigrate to join her twin sister, who is happily married to a carpenter (now reformed from earlier financial irresponsibility and fraud), but expects to die soon—a victim of the ‘physical and psychological toll’ of ‘economic conflict’ (Sussman [2003], p. 175). In the opening paragraph Fanny stresses that she is not telling her ‘melancholy story’ as a lesson to stop others wanting to rise above their station in life, but for readers to judge her as she cannot judge herself: ‘Am I evil-minded? … What have been my errors, that I am now an outcast and a wretch?’ (266). One way of reading the story is as ‘upholding middle-class values by criticizing Lord Reginald’s support of aristocratic extravagance and opposition to charity’ (Sussman [2003], p. 175). Sussman notes that marriage, as often in MWS’s tales, ‘is an all-or-nothing choice: remaining inside the institution ensures visibility for the wife, if she is willing to forget all other ties; resistance to that stricture erodes her visibility and value’ (p. 175).

Pascal, Blaise (1623–1662) Mathematician, physicist and religious thinker. In ‘Pascal’ (French Lives), he excites wonder for his precocious intellectual ability and his application of ‘the subtlety and acuteness of his understanding to religious subjects’ (LL 3.71). But he inspires ‘sentiments of mingled pity and admiration’ for his self-­ mortifying dedication to virtue and the gospel. The ‘view he took of human duties was distorted and exaggerated’, opposed to friendship and love, and seeing ‘impiety in every sensation of pleasure which God has scattered as flowers over our thorny path’ (LL 3.90). The principal sources of ‘Pascal’ are the lives by his sister, Gilberte Périer (1663) and in the 1819 edition of his works (LL 3.xv).

Pasta, Giuditta (1797–1865) Soprano. MWS first saw her as Romeo in Niccolò Zingarelli’s Giulietta e Romeo at the King’s Theatre in 1824. She was impressed by Pasta’s combination of ‘intellectual beauty, grace, perfect tragic action’ and ‘a fine voice & a sentiment in singing I never saw equalled’ (MWSL 1.445; compare 1.449). In

  Paul, Georgiana (‘Gee’) 

207

1826, she was similarly delighted at her performances in Giovanni Paisiello’s Nina and Simon Mayr’s Medea (MWSL 1.520). In Rambles, she says that Pasta awakened ‘the tenderest sympathy … joined to that soft return to one’s own past afflictions, which subdued the soul and opened the fountain of tears’ (NSW 8.121). The singer also moves Ethel when she goes to the opera for the first time in Lodore (NSW 6.102).

Paul, Georgiana (‘Gee’) (1805–1847) Close friend of MWS, sister of Aubrey ∗Beauclerk. As a teenager she probably first met MWS in ∗Pisa (see MWSL 1.231 n.4) and she knew her again from the late 1820s. She was married to John Dean Paul (1802–1868), MWS’s banker from 1832 or earlier. On 18 November 1831 MWS says that Gee Paul has been ‘cast away & deserted’ and her ‘first impulse is to befriend a woman’ (MWSJ 524); it is likely that her husband had, whether justifiably or not, accused her of adultery (MWSJ 524 n.2). She signed the ‘act of separation’ in MWS’s presence in February 1832. MWS continued to visit and write to her; they saw each other more often from about 1843 when she was reconciled with her husband and returned to live in ∗London (MWSJ 524–5 n.3). MWS was with her in her last illness at the end of 1847 and wrote that ‘She shed a charm over my life by the lively & affectionate interest she took in all that belonged to me that I shall miss at every hour, in every act’ (MWSL 3.331).

Payne, John Howard (1791–1852) American actor and playwright. He knew MWS between 1823 and his return to ∗America in 1832. She politely rejected his declaration of love in June 1825 (MWSL 1.493 n.2). Throughout their friendship he was helpful in providing her with free theatre tickets. See also: Irving, Washington.

Peacock, Thomas Love (1785–1866) Satirical novelist and friend and executor of PBS. MWS first met him in ∗London in autumn 1814 and saw him often in ∗Windsor, ∗Marlow and

208 P

London between 1815 and 1818. There was some coldness between them, resulting partly from Peacock’s friendship with Harriet ∗Shelley; after MWS’s death one of the aims of his Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1858–1860) was to insist that, contrary to the account preferred by Sir Percy and [Jane,] Lady ∗Shelley, PBS’s relationship with Harriet had not ended before he took up with MWS. She and Peacock remained, however, on fairly cordial terms after her return to England in 1823. From the late 1830s Peacock’s daughter, Mary Ellen (1821–1861), was also her friend. There is some resemblance between MWS and the earnest, unconventional and very well-read Anthelia in Peacock’s Melincourt (1817). Celinda in Nightmare Abbey (1818) has some of the same characteristics but draws as much on ∗Wollstonecraft and independent-minded women more generally as on MWS. Further reading: Butler (1979).

Peake, Richard Brinsley (1792–1847) Prolific playwright, author of farces and melodramas, whose works include ∗Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein and the burlesque Another Piece of Presumption (Adelphi Theatre, London, 1823).

Pearson, Henry Hugh (1815–1873) Composer, resident for much of his life in ∗Germany. (From the 1850s he called himself Henry Hugo Pierson.) MWS draws attention to his settings of poems by PBS in Rambles (NSW 8.197). He travelled, mainly in ∗Italy, with MWS, her son and ∗Knox, between August and November 1842. She found him a difficult and divisive companion: see MWSL 3.45, 49–50. See also: ‘Oh listen while I sing to thee’.

Pecksie see Nicknames, Mary Shelley’s. Pellico, Silvio (1789–1854) Italian playwright and liberal journalist, arrested by the Austrian authorities in 1820. Elizabeth’s father in the 1831 Frankenstein is an Italian patriot who lingers

  Perkin Warbeck 

209

‘in the dungeons of Austria’ (NSW 1.191); NSW 1.191n. and Crook (2000a), p. 6, link him to Pellico, who was released from the fortress of Spielberg in 1830. MWS questions Pellico’s forgiving attitude in Le mie prigione (1832) as encouraging ‘passive obedience’ (‘Modern Italian Romances’, LL 4.258–9). In Rambles she says that he ‘bowed with resignation to the will of God—but he still kept his foot upon the power of the tyrant’ (NSW 8.276).

Perkin Warbeck The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, A Romance was written between about September 1827 and autumn 1829 and revised in November 1829 onwards (NSW 5.xiii–xv). It was published by ∗Colburn and Bentley in three volumes (by ‘the Author of “Frankenstein”’) on 13 May 1830. MWS had sold the copyright to the publishers for £150  in January 1830 (MWSL 2.98 and n.1). There was a pirate edition by Carey, Lea and Blanchard of Philadelphia in 1834. The premise of the story is that the young man known as Perkin Warbeck is, as he claims, Richard, Duke of York, one of the two ‘Princes in the Tower’ who has survived. (That the title does not feature the name Richard perhaps reflects a human lack of idealism and trust—people reject the true prince.) The long Wars of the Roses between the houses of York and Lancaster (whose emblems are the white rose and the red) have ended in victory for King Henry VII.  Richard, the Yorkist claimant, is concealed in Flanders and travels to ∗France, ∗Spain, ∗Ireland and ∗Scotland. His claim receives powerful support, for a time, from King James IV of Scotland, who credits and honours him sufficiently to promote his marriage to a Scottish noblewoman, Lady Katherine Gordon. She remains proudly loyal to her husband; an exculpatory final chapter aims to explain why she remains at the court of his enemy after his death. He loves her intensely but also has a close relationship with Monina de Faro, who remains self-sacrificingly true to him. There is a large, often historically derived cast of Richard’s devoted supporters and of those who betray or desert him. Clifford, whose love for Monina is not returned, betrays him but maintains ambivalent feelings towards him. ‘He hated the prince; but he hated and despised himself ’ (NSW 5.320; for Clifford as a monstrous ­alter-­ego of Richard see Hopkins [1997], p. 267). Even Richard’s enemies are often impressed by his pure nobility and integrity, which is contrasted frequently with ‘the ungenerous dictates of [Henry’s] grovelling spirit’ (NSW 5.370). Political intrigue, misfortune and military defeat prevent his success as, sometimes, does his own idealism. In the closing chapters Richard stoically endures imprisonment and resists his enemy’s attempts to humiliate

210 P

him. He temporarily escapes, and is eventually executed for treason having plotted another escape with his fellow Yorkist prisoner, his cousin the Earl of Warwick.

Sources MWS consulted many historical sources. In her preface she mentions the sixteenth-century chronicles of Holinshed and Hall, Bacon’s The History of the Reign of King Henry VII (1622) and Hume’s History of England (1754–1761) (NSW 5.5). (Palacio 141 suggests that her first idea for the novel came from her reading of Hume in 1818.) In the preface she also alludes favourably to works sympathetic to Richard/Perkin’s cause, meaning particularly (NSW 5.5, note c) Horace ∗Walpole’s Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third (1768) and John Bayley’s The History and Antiquities of the Tower of London … (1821–1825). Walpole provided a clear résumé of the case in favour of Perkin as prince (Palacio 153) and an implicit contrast between Richard III and Henry VII. (In the novel Richard III is, for Palacio 153–4, ‘as it were rehabilitated’ in the person of his illegitimate son, the faithful Edmund Plantagenet.) The prominence of the Warbeck affair in Bayley’s ‘popular anti-­ history’ is linked by Webster-Garrett (2006) with insurrectionary times: ‘the wake of the Peterloo Massacre, the Cato Street Conspiracy, and George IV’s public sex scandals’ (p.  110). To make Perkin/Richard the legitimate heir, Bennett (1998) points out, is to undermine ‘the very concept of legitimate monarchical power’ (pp. 88–9). Other points of reference include Amable Brugière de Barante’s Histoire des Ducs de Bourgogne … (1824–1826), ∗Irving’s The Conquest of Granada (1829) (see NSW 5.xviii n.17; 85n.), Thomas Crofton Croker’s Researches in the South of Ireland (1824) and John Pinkerton’s The History of Scotland from the Accession of the House of Stuart to that of Mary (1797). MWS also wrote seeking historical information and suggestions for reading from Croker, ∗Godwin, ∗Bowring, ∗Mérimée, ∗Scott and others: see NSW 5.xiii–xiv. (For fuller lists of sources, see NSW 5.xiii–iv and xvii n.6 and Palacio 152–4.) But for all the mining of historical sources, Perkin Warbeck remains passionately engaged with its ­characters. Hopkins (1997) points out that there is none of the ‘dispassionate irony of a ∗Gibbon or the sobriety of a Hume’: more in line with Walpole’s warmth, MWS creates improbable outcomes and angelic and demonic extra-­ historical characters or readings of character—an Edmund Plantagenet of ‘popular legend rather than serious historiography’, an angelically good Katherine and Monina versus some ‘quasi-demonic’ villains, a James IV with

  Perkin Warbeck 

211

anachronistic scruples about taking mistresses. ‘Such characterological chiaroscuro … belongs more to the absolutes and the polarities of the ∗Gothic … than to the more muted, balanced palette with which characters are more generally painted in historiography’ (p. 263). The many epigraphs from Shakespeare’s history plays provide a link to more generally familiar treatments of fifteenth-century politics; there is an implicit challenge to a version of events in which the Yorkist Richard III is a tyrant who murders his own nephews. (See further Hopkins [1997], pp. 265–6). There are also epigraphs from John Ford’s The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck (1634), an earlier revision or complication of the Tudor myth of Henry VII’s providential victory. Ford’s hero, unlike MWS’s, is not revealed as either a prince or an impostor but shares his nobility, his ability to act like a king; Ford’s loyal Katherine is also perhaps an influence on MWS’s, and the two authors treat similarly Perkin’s devoted, naively optimistic followers like Heron and Skelton. (For more detailed links see Palacio 156–8 and Hopkins [1997], pp. 264–5). Allen (2008) suggests that ‘Clifford’s story of intrigue and obsessive desire for irrational revenge mirrors the story of Godwin’s Mandeville’ (pp. 132–3). The historical novels of Scott provide a source and example. Asking him about Scottish material, MWS is apologetic about intruding on his ‘ground’ (MWSL 2.78). The two contrasting heroines, Katherine and Monina (like Euthanasia and Beatrice in Valperga), owe something to Rowena and Rebecca in Ivanhoe (1819). There is some interest in historical local colour. But there is more interest in the women in themselves, in the connections or contrasts between them—as against (Lynch [2003]) ‘the hero’s prudential choice between heroines’; MWS gestures towards ‘stories falling outside the purview of [Scott’s] narratives of national progress’ (p. 144). And the antiquarianism is much less detailed. If once the novel seemed to many, as to Rossetti (1890), ‘a pallid imitation of Walter Scott’ (p. 213), it is now often seen, rather, as a challenge to the conventions of the historical novel established by Scott. For Lynch (2003), the last chapter of Perkin Warbeck gives ‘a jagged feeling … at precisely the moment when the narrative … should join up seamlessly with official history … Granting women stories beyond those that can be subsumed within the marriage plot undermines the very alignments of private and public, domestic and national, accomplished in the marriage plots of the Waverley novels’ (p. 144). Hopkins (1997) finds biographical sources including ‘the trauma surrounding motherhood’ as ‘manifested in marginality and displacement’, the end of the novel as ‘primarily concerned with the guilt of the survivor’, and Richard as a PBS figure: an idealist, honourable, but also an instance of ‘the

212 P

chaos that one well-intentioned but exceptional being can wreak on the lives of those around him’ (pp. 270–2). For Katherine as an MWS self-portrait see Brewer (1999), p. 202. Bennett (1998), however, points out that while the character’s ‘sphere remains personal within the established system,’ MWS ‘continued, in her own writing and in her editing of P.B. Shelley’s works, to actively promote reform’ (p. 90).

Themes and Focuses Richard, the main male character, at times displays a traditionally feminine sensibility. On several occasions he reacts with horror to the bloodshed inevitably resulting from his attempts to take the throne. In particular he is shocked by the devastation of Northumberland by Scottish soldiers invading on his behalf, turns to fight them and asks James IV to end the attack and ‘the hellish work’ (NSW 5.252–6). Later ‘he reflected with some wonder that, in every adversity, women had been his resource and support’ with ‘their energies, their undying devotion and enthusiasm’ (NSW 5.352). His position as the dispossessed claimant has obvious similarities with that of women in society more generally—as well as, within the novel, the marginalization of Jane Shore or of Richard’s mother Elizabeth Woodville and sister Elizabeth of York. (Perkin Warbeck makes the latter loyal, in spite of her marriage to Henry, to the Yorkist cause; her husband underrates her, taking her strength of endurance for ‘tameness’ [NSW 5.346] and one of Katherine’s main motives for living on at his court is, as Richard wanted, to lend support to Elizabeth [NSW 5.399].) But Richard’s quasi-feminine credentials are compromised. Repeatedly he returns to war as the only way of advancing his claim. Patriotism and hurt pride—‘what am I … that I am to be made the curse and scourge of my own people?’ (NSW 5.256)—as well as compassion for the victims motivates his abandonment of the Scottish-led invasion. Richard has only a rather petulant, masculinist answer—‘”By my fay! … thou wouldst teach me to turn spinster …’—to the Earl of Surrey’s refusal to join the rebellion, although he has no love for Henry VII, because he refuses ‘to bring back the deadly horrors of unholy civil war’ (NSW 5.195). Surrey’s ‘words … were fulfilled’ and the narrator is clear, with reference to Richard’s ‘right’ to the throne, that ‘narrow and selfish was that sentiment that could see, in any right appertaining to one man the excuse for the misery of thousands’ (NSW 5.252). Nevertheless, it is clear that Richard is in a difficult situation. If he renounces his ‘right’, is he at the same time renouncing his identity? For a few days, at sea, he experiences an ecstatic union with nature and Katherine; ‘the kingdom

  Perkin Warbeck 

213

of his inheritance dwindled into a mere speck’ and he acknowledges the supreme, exalting power of love (NSW 5.277). But by this stage, it is impossible for Richard, ‘marked for misery and defeat’ (278) to turn back. Allen (2008) diagnoses his main problem: he ‘confuses an ontological truth (his true identity) with an ethical imperative (his right to the throne)’ (p. 127). And Bunnell (2002) considers ‘the tragic irony’ that ‘a fulfilling domestic life is possible only if he also enacts the role of the impostor, Perkin; he sacrifices that life if he “plays” himself on the public stage’ (p. 139). Such difficulties prevent simple rejection of the prince. As Allen (2008) notes, ‘through the narrator’s deeply personal relationship with her protagonist, Shelley’ expresses ‘her life-long admiration for and critique of the male idealist philosophies of her husband, her father and wider circle’ (pp. 134–5). Perhaps Richard’s imperfections leave Katherine as the true hero of the novel. She is ‘a favourite’ (NSW 5.395n.) of the narrator/author. She practises self-sacrificing loyalty to her husband and perceives that ‘It was but being an actor in different scenes, to be a potentate or a peasant’, that whether she is to share a throne or a prison with Richard she will be performing happily ‘the part assigned to her on earth’ (NSW 5.291). In her promotion of a domestic, peaceful life she is not, however, a passive participant in her marriage. Katherine’s final chapter of self-justification gives her ‘a voice that previous historical accounts have silenced, a voice that literally has the last word’ (Bunnell [2002], p. 147; see also Wake [1997], p. 247). It is a voice pragmatic as well as idealist. Katherine continues loyal to her husband (her subsequent marriages in real life are omitted) but rejects Edmund’s simplistic commitment to the past in favour of loving engagement with the living and an awareness of her own weaknesses and strengths. She is content to be humanly ‘imperfect … so that I never lose the ennobling attribute of my species, the constant endeavour to be more perfect’ (NSW 5.400; Allen [2008] notes that this is ‘a reaffirmation of the Godwinian doctrine of perfectibility, only now modulated into a realistic, even pragmatic tone’ [137].) Her apologia represents not an abandonment of MWS’s ‘reformist ideals’ but ‘a version of Promethean renunciation of power on a human scale’ (Bennett [1998], p. 90). She tells Edmund that she has only ‘a woman’s education in the world, which is that of the heart … not of the head’ (NSW 5.398) but makes a clear and coherent case for herself and the wisdom of the heart; if Richard had listened more to what Katherine calls ‘the voice of my own soul which speaks within me’ (398) his life would no doubt have been happier. Monina is the other female character who has attracted most interest. Webster-Garrett (2006) feels that she is ‘chivalry poisoned’ and shows how ‘women are taught to be victims’ (p. 123). (Brewer [1999] discusses Katherine’s

214 P

more ambivalent attitude to chivalry: ‘she respects [its] lofty ideals but objects to its violent tendencies’ [p. 200].) For Bunnell (2002) Monina’s ‘obsession with the roles she plays contributes to Richard’s downfall and to her own self-­ delusion’; she becomes ‘unable to see life as anything but a drama of Richard’s struggle for the throne’ (p. 143).

Reviews Perkin Warbeck attracted few substantial reviews and there was little attention to the topicality of its political implications for ‘monarchical Europe’ (Bennett [1998], p. 90). For The Athenaeum (29 May 1830) the novel is written ‘with a noble energy of thought—a deep concentration of feeling—a fervid glow of expression, and sweet purity of sentiments’. Some of the characters have ‘an originality which strikingly marks the powerfully-creative mind of the author of “Frankenstein”’ (p. 323). The reviewer selects extracts including a character-­ study of Monina and Richard’s meeting with Jane Shore (NSW 5.90, 190–2). The briefer account in the New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal for November 1830 thinks that sometimes the author ‘overlooks the vraisemblance of the romance in her eagerness to impress upon the reader her own peculiar view of the historical fact’; but the book is ‘written with great energy both of thought and expression, as well as with feminine delicacy of feeling and perception’ (p. 457). Other reviews are summarized in Palacio 665–7. Further reading: Bennett (1978); Sites (2005a).

Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) (1304–1374) Poet. MWS was familiar with his work by 1819 at the latest, and following PBS’s death ‘he became important to her as one of the supreme poets of grief ’ (LL 1.xlviii). His work and biography function often as a touchstone for purity of love and of style (see for example LL 2.41, 92). ‘Petrarch’ in Italian Lives quotes extensively from the poet’s letters, Canzoni, and Trionfi, and draws (LL 1.xlviii) on Jacques-François de Sade’s Mémoires de la vie de F.  Pétrarque (1764) and ∗Foscolo’s Essays on Petrarch (1823). See also Dante Alighieri. Further reading: Kucich (2000); Zuccato (2008).

  ‘The Pilgrims’ 

215

‘The Pilgrims’ Story published anonymously in November 1837  in The Keepsake for MDCCCXXXVIII and in 1852, as ‘The Pilgrims: A Tale of Chivalry’, in the Philadelphia annual The Snow-Flake for MDCCCLII. MWS is probably, but not certainly, the author: see CT 393. Burkhardt of Unspunnen tells two young pilgrims the sad tale of how he cast off and cursed his once beloved daughter, Ida, when she married the son of his enemy. He wishes—with possible echoes of The Ancient Mariner and Prometheus Unbound—that he could recall his curse. To his great joy, the pilgrims reveal themselves as his grandchildren, Hermann and the second Ida, who were sent by the dying Ida to tell him of her desire for forgiveness and to bring a last letter from her. A knight, Walter de Blumfeldt, comes to the castle and Burkhardt—still keen to atone for the way he treated his daughter—encourages the love between him and young Ida; they are seen together in the Keepsake engraving by Stodart after Edward Corbould. At the double wedding of Ida and Walter and Hermann and the daughter of a local baron, Walter reveals that he is the Duke of Zähringen and that his late  father, another of Burkhardt’s enemies, repented of the wrongs he had done him. Unspunnen is a ruined medieval castle in ∗Switzerland, near Interlaken. It was owned by Burkart of Unspunnen, and then by the barons of Wädenswil or Wädischwil—whence Rupert and Conrad of Wädischwyl in the story— in the thirteenth century. The House of Zaringen flourished in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries and is chronicled by, among others, Francis Hare-­Naylor in The History of Helvetia … to the Middle of the Fifteenth Century (1801). (Hare-Naylor’s son, Francis Hare, was married to AnneFrances ∗Hare.) Conceivably the procession of Walter’s retainers for the wedding (CT 293) is inspired by the festival held in the ruins of the castle in 1805 and 1808 and described in Ann Yosy’s Switzerland, As Now Divided Into Nineteen Cantons (1815), pp.  72–3. (Yosy calls Unspunnen ‘Huchspumer’.) Markley (2000) looks at the tale as ‘In many ways … a prose re-writing’ of ∗Coleridge’s Christabel, with Burkhardt, like Sir Leoline, neglecting his daughter for his ‘obsessive relationship with a rival’ (pp.  122–3). Reconciliation is, as in such MWS works as Lodore and Falkner, an evident theme.

216 P

Pisa The Shelleys stayed here, longer than in any other Italian town, for much of the time between January 1820 and April 1822. They lived at Casa Frassi in January-June 1820, at Palazzo Galetti and Palazzo Aulla in October 1820-­ May 1821 and at Tre Palazzi di Chiesa in October 1821-April 1822. They were at the nearby Bagni di San Giuliano (or di Pisa) in August-October 1820 and May-October 1821. After PBS’s death, MWS returned briefly to the Tre Palazzi for late July and early August 1822. In ‘The English in Italy’ she recommends Pisa’s ‘equable climate’, the ease of getting ‘English comforts’ via ∗Livorno, and the picturesque surrounding countryside (NSW 2.154); here the young ∗Petrarch beheld ‘the marble palaces of the Lung’ Arno, and the free open squares surrounded by majestic structures’ (LL 1.10). The streets are quiet ‘and the whole town wears a sober, scholastic aspect’; it is, she later says, ‘half-unpeopled’ (NSW 2.154, 318). She expresses contempt for the inhabitants in MWSL 1.136–7 and MWSJ 340. Particularly towards the beginning of their time in Pisa the Shelleys socialized with some prominent local individuals including ∗Pacchiani and ∗Vaccà. MWS knew enough of the Professors at the university by January 1821 to send a list of seventeen of them (including Pacchiani and Vaccà), mostly with highly unflattering comments, to George Tighe (Bennett [2001], pp. 28–30). In Pisa she also met ∗Sgricci, ∗Viviani, ∗Mavrokordatos and other Greek exiles, and ∗Guiccioli and her brother Count Pietro Gamba. In the later part of their time in the city the Shelleys were part of an expatriate ‘Pisan circle’ including ∗Byron, Edward and Jane ∗Williams, ∗Taaffe, ∗Medwin and ∗Trelawny. Schoina (2009) points out that perception of such a group depends, to some extent, on MWS’s role as its ‘retrospective constructor’ (p. 5).

Plato (c.429–347 BCE) Athenian philosopher. MWS transcribed PBS’s translation of The Symposium in July and August 1818 (MWSJ 220–2) and included an edited text in PBS 1840 (Essays), omitting or toning down, with some assistance from Leigh ∗Hunt, its references to homosexual love (see BSM xx.127–30). She may also have continued PBS’s version of Plato’s Menexenus (BSM 23.32). Diotima in The Fields of Fancy derives from The Symposium; see also Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus: Sources.

 Plutarch 

217

Plutarch (