CHAPTER 1
Frankenstein's Mother
I slept, indeed, but I was disturbed by the wildest dreams.... I thought thatI held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, andI saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel.
—from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
A dreadful creature, still reeking of the graveyard parts from which he wasassembled, opens his dull yellow eyes and breathes. Cowering before him is apale-faced young scientist, horror-struck by what he has brought to life. Inthat moment Dr. Victor Frankenstein became the father of a monster who hashaunted the world's imagination ever since.
The true mother of Frankenstein and his monster, however, was MaryWollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, who conceived them both when she was nineteenyears old.
Even as a young girl, Mary had a taste for graveyards. Her slender figure in itsloose muslin dress and flat-heeled shoes could often be seen threading its waythrough the streets of early nineteenth-century London toward old St. Pancraschurchyard, the site of her mother's grave.
It was a long walk to the outskirts of the city, but Mary didn't mind. In herearly teens, pale and pretty with delicate features and almond-shaped eyes thatchanged from gray to hazel under a cloud of light reddish-brown hair, she lookedmore fragile than she was. Besides, no matter how long the walk, it was worth itto get away from her large, mismatched (five children, no two parents incommon), and often irritating family.
Leaving behind the schoolroom she shared with her half-sister Fanny and herstepsister Jane, and the sound of young William's boots thumping and clatteringthrough the rickety five-story house, Mary pattered down the stump-a-stumpstaircase, past the study where her father spent his days writing and receivingcallers under the watchful eyes of the portrait of his first wife. Down anotherflight of stairs and she was in the bookshop. She slipped past her stepmother,busy with customers, and emerged from under the carved figure of Aesop that hungabove the door of M. J. Godwin & Co. Displayed in the corner shop's curvedwindow were the children's books her father and stepmother published and sold.
She walked west along Skinner Street, past milliners, furriers, coffee dealers,oil shops, and warehouses. Like most streets in nineteenth-century London,Skinner Street was noisy with the clatter of horses' hooves and iron-wheeledcarts careening over cobblestones, smelly and dirty with the contents of chamberpots flung from upper windows and running through the open sewers of thestreets, cruel with rowdies like the gangs around the corner on Snow Hill whowere known to shove old women into barrels and roll them downhill.
A few blocks to the northeast, live cattle jostled down St. John's Street toSmithfield Market every morning to be sold and slaughtered. One block to thesoutheast, near Newgate Prison, huge crowds gathered outside the Old Baileycourthouse on hanging days to watch the fun before adjourning to the Magpie andStump for a pint of ale. Turning her back on these killing fields, Marycontinued west along Holborn and then north.
The crowded, dirty, noisy, smelly life of the streets buzzed around her.Playbills plastered shop windows, drunks reeled from beer pubs and gin palaces,peddlers cried their wares, shouts rose from back-alley dogfights andcockfights, ballad singers bawled the story of the latest sensational crime, andeager customers bought cheap broadsheets filled with tales of murder and doomedcriminals' last confessions.
As she reached the neighborhood of St. Pancras, the noise and filth fell away.Here, within sight of the green fields of Camden Town, Mary was born and hadlived until she was ten years old. Reaching the old church and the peacefultree-shaded churchyard beside it, she settled down, as always, on her favoritebench next to her mother's tomb.
It was here she came to daydream, to make up stories that would ward off theloneliness she often felt despite her large family and her friends. Somethingwas missing in her life—some beloved companion with whom she could share herinnermost hopes and dreams. "Loneliness has been the curse of my life," shelater wrote. "What should I have done if my imagination had not been mycompanion? I must have groveled on the earth—I must have died—O but my dreams mydarling sun bright dreams! They peopled the churchyard I was doomed so young towander in."
Graveyards could be pleasant places in those days; people often treated themlike parks, quiet spots of shade and green away from the glare and noise of thecity. At night, lovers met and made love among the gravestones. But Mary knewwhat lay beneath the earth. In some parts of London, burial grounds were so fullthat from time to time corpses piled on top of each other would break throughthe surface, emitting a poisonous stench.
At night in St. Sepulchre's churchyard, a few blocks from where Mary lived,grave robbers dug bodies from fresh graves, then sold their gruesome harvest tothe surgeons at nearby St. Bartholemew's Hospital, who had few legal ways to getthe bodies they needed to dissect and study except from these "resurrectionmen." Most of the time, Mary was able to keep the two realities separate—thepleasant trees and grass, the old stone church aboveground, the rotting bodies,including her mother's, below.
Mary had been coming to her mother's grave ever since she was a little girl, herhand clasped in her father's. She always recognized it by the two weeping willowtrees her father had planted on either side. Sometimes he would take her fingerand help her trace the letters carved on the stone: Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin,she would repeat after him, her tongue stumbling over the hard words as herfinger followed the sharp edges of the stone. Author of A Vindication of theRights of Woman, Born 27th April 1759/Died 10th September 1797. They were thefirst words she learned to read. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was her name too,the same name as belonged to the woman who had died giving her daughter life.She'd heard the story many times.
During the summer of 1797, immense storms had ravaged England. Tidal floods andwhirling waterspouts struck the coast. Floods lay waste large parts of thecountry. Frightening electrical storms rife with fireballs and lightning rippedacross the skies. A freak hailstorm killed birds by the score.
At No. 29, the Polygon, one of a ring of connected houses on the outskirts ofLondon, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the famous author of A Vindication of theRights of Woman, awaited the birth of her second child. As the rains beat downon the fields of Somers Town, lashed the windows, roared about the roof, sheworked on her latest novel, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman. Throughout the day,she sent and received notes from her husband, William Godwin, like herself afamous radical writer, where he worked in his rooms at No. 17, EveshamBuildings, some twenty doors away. And she looked after her little daughter,three-year-old Fanny, who loved to romp with her adored mama, especially on themornings she stayed in her room and breakfasted in bed.
On August 14, the weather calmed. Amazed Londoners saw a circle of glowing lightappear in the night sky. For eleven days, the unexpected comet shone above thecity. Mary and William Godwin called it their unborn baby's lucky star.
Mary wasn't one to make a fuss about the difficulties of childbirth. She lookedforward to her upcoming delivery without fear. Despite her age, she was in goodhealth and had delivered Fanny easily. She would have the baby at home, shedecided, attended by a midwife. Midwives and male doctors had fought for controlof childbirth for more than a century: Doctors claimed that midwives wereignorant; midwives said that doctors were jargon spouting quacks too quick to useinstruments. Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of feminism, had faith in her own sex.On Wednesday, August 30, when she went into labor, she called in Mrs.Blenkinsop, matron and midwife to the Westminster Lying-In Hospital.
Mary's attitude was lighthearted but impatient. "I have no doubt of seeing theanimal today," she wrote Godwin. "Pray send me the newspaper. I wish I had anovel or some book of sheer amusement to excite curiosity and while away thetime."
And later, "Mrs. Blenkinsop tells me I am in the most natural state, and canpromise me a safe delivery, but that I must have a little patience."
Eight hours later, her patience was rewarded. Just before midnight, a healthybaby girl was born. Godwin recorded the event in his diary: "Birth of Mary, 20minutes after 11 at night."
Although the birth was normal, the placenta, usually expelled a few minutesafter birth, failed to appear. Dr. Poignard, a physician at the WestminsterHospital, came to remove it by hand—a long, painful, bloody process. It was 8A.M. before he was done. Mary was weak but otherwise had come through her ordealin fine shape. Her friend, Dr. Fordyce, also a believer in midwives, stopped into see her. Later that day, he told a friend, "Mary had had a woman, and wasdoing extremely well."
But despite appearances, she was not doing well. And it wasn't Mrs. Blenkinsopwho was to blame. Doctors at the time, knowing nothing of the causes ofinfection, didn't sterilize their hands or their instruments. During the longhours Dr. Poignard had spent removing the placenta, he had introduced infectioninto Mary's body. In attempting to save her life, he had unknowingly caused herdeath.
For the next two days, however, Mary seemed fine. She gained strength; friendscame to visit. She and Godwin cooed over the new baby. But on Saturday evening,she felt ill and woke on Sunday with violent shivering fits. Septicemia, orblood poisoning, had set in. This serious, even fatal, condition is caused byharmful bacteria entering the bloodstream, often after a surgical procedure. Thebacteria multiply and invade other organs, causing fever, chills, and sweatingand infecting the lungs, kidneys, and brain. Antibiotics would have cured it,but in 1797 they didn't exist.
Doctors came and went, but Mary only grew worse. Fanny and the new baby weresent to a friend's house. Godwin sat by his wife's bedside, offering her sips ofwine to take the edge off her pain. By Thursday, it was clear that she wasdying. During the next two days, husband and wife talked quietly of her deathand of the children she was leaving behind. Her last words were of her husband:"He is the kindest, best man in the world."
On Sunday morning, September 10, Mary Wollstonecraft died. Godwin, who recordedeverything in his diary, wrote only "20 minutes before 8" followed by threeblank lines. He was too grief-stricken to attend her funeral. On Friday, she wasburied in St. Pancras churchyard in the company of a few close friends.
Her daughter Mary, eleven days old when her mother died, had begun her lifeshadowed by death, a shadow that would loom again and again. A major theme ofMary Shelley's life story is the death of those she most loved. Perhaps it's notsurprising that she grew up to create a hero who snatched dead bodies from thegrave and made them live.
CHAPTER 2
Nobody's Girl but Papa's
And thou, strange star! ascendant at my birth Which rained, they said, kindinfluence on the earth So from great parents sprung, I dared boast Fortune myfriend....
—from The Choice by Mary Shelley
The little fair-haired girl, only two and a half years old, strained andstretched to see across the fields to the trees at Camden Town. Papa was gone.He'd been away for days and days, and though Mary had watched across the fieldsshe hadn't seen him come striding up. Papa hadn't left her alone, of course. Shehad Fanny, her big sister, for company, and as always Mrs. Jones looked afterher; other nice ladies, friends of Papa's, also came and made a fuss. And whenPapa left, he invited his friend Mr. Marshall, who was a very nice man, to comeand stay. But Papa had been away so long. What if he was never coming back?Perhaps he had given her to Mr. Marshall to be his little girl. She was verymuch afraid.
Now Mr. Marshall said he had a letter from Papa and in it was a message forMary. Papa hadn't forgotten her. Somehow he knew what she had feared. Mr.Marshall read aloud the comforting words: "Tell Mary, I will not give her away,and she shall be nobody's little girl but Papa's. Papa is gone away, but Papawill very soon come back again, and see the Polygon across two fields from thetrunks of the trees at Camden Town."
Mary adored her father. Her love for him was the earliest feeling she couldremember. Until she was sixteen, she said, "I may justly say that he was myGod." As a little girl, being allowed to leave her nurse to be with Papa filledher with pride. She'd sit and stare at him, waiting for the look or gesture thatsaid she could come near. He was the fixed point in her life, the one she couldrely on. When she was naughty, all he had to do was look at her with silentdisapproval, and she would cry.
Her father's fixed point, however, was gone. William Godwin had grieved formonths after his wife's death. Nowhere, he told a friend, was there a woman whohad combined such a clear and deep intelligence "with so much goodness of heartand sweetness of manners" as his late wife. Her equal didn't exist. He wouldnever get over his loss. "I have not the least expectation that I can now everknow happiness again."
He turned her bedroom into his study. Here he devoted himself to editing herworks and writing her life story, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of theRights of Woman. He hung her portrait, painted a few months before she died,where he could see it as he worked. Every day when Mary visited him, she saw hermother's serene and beautiful face gazing dreamily into the distance. A portraitof her father hung facing it across the room, just as her parents might havefaced each other across a table, if her mother were still alive.
Mary Wollstonecraft had cut a wide swath through her times, scandalizing peopleright and left, even her radical friends. In a time when most women were raisedto be husband catchers, she had struggled to earn her own living and make a namefor herself. She had felt the wrongs done to women on her own skin. In 1792,when she was in her early thirties, she wrote A Vindication of the Rights ofWoman, a fervent defense of women's equality. It brought instant fame andguaranteed her immortality. She was a woman of great mind and great heart; whenshe gave, she gave all and was shocked and dismayed when her generosity wasn'treturned. Independent and intellectual, witty and warm, tender yet passionate,Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was a hard act to follow.
She had been part of a circle of English freethinkers who sympathized with theaims and spirit of the French Revolution. When an angry mob stormed the Bastilleprison on July 14, 1789, she had been thrilled and inspired. Fierce for therights of man and woman, she'd sped across the English Channel to Paris to get alook at events for herself. There she'd fallen in love with an Americanadventurer, Gilbert Imlay, the great passion of her life, and bore his child,her daughter Fanny.
Her passionate nature and generosity of spirit served her poorly in dealing withImlay, who never regarded their affair as seriously as she did. When he tookanother mistress, she fell into despair and tried to kill herself, not once, buttwice.
By the mid-1790s, the ideals of the French Revolution had disintegrated into theblood and gore of the Reign of Terror. Mary Wollstonecraft heard the rumbles ofthe cart carrying King Louis XVI to the guillotine. Soon hundreds of men andwomen were having their heads chopped off every week. France had decided tocarry its revolution to the rest of Europe. By 1793, it was at war with manycountries, including Great Britain.
In 1794, Mary returned to an England full of frightened middle- and upper-classpeople, sure their own lower classes were about to turn on them. Newspapers werefull of rumors of bloodthirsty revolutionaries out to destroy society.Cartoonists drew huge guillotines dripping with blood. Because of the war,prices rose. Poor people couldn't get food to eat. As King George III drovethrough the streets, a crowd of perhaps 200,000 pressed against his coach,shouting, "No king! Give us peace and bread."
For the first time, the British government set agents to spy on its own people.Censorship increased. The "Gagging Acts" of November 1795 restricted publicmeetings and speechmaking. Anyone who favored progressive or radical ideas wasidentified with the "republican, regicidal, atheistic French."
