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FRANKENSTEIN IN CONTEXTMARY SHELLEY: LIFE AND TIMES
1797 (30 August) Mary Shelley is born in London,
the only child of philosopher and political radical
William Godwin and pioneering feminist Mary
Wollstonecraft, who died ten days after her
daughter's birth
1814 Mary begins a relationship with the poet
Percy Bysshe Shelley and elopes with him in the
summer of this year
1815 Mary gives birth prematurely to a daughter
who dies soon afterwards
1816 Mary gives birth to a son, William. Mary and
Percy spend the summer on Lake Geneva. The
idea for Frankenstein comes out of a ghost story
competition
1818 Frankenstein is published. Jane Austen
publishes Northanger Abbey
1822 Percy Bysshe Shelley drowns in a boating
accident. Mary returns to London
1823 The first theatre adaptation of Frankenstein is performed: Richard Brinsley
Peake's Presumption: or, the Fate of Frankenstein
1831 The revised version of Frankenstein is published with a new 'Author's Introduction'
1837 Queen Victoria accedes to the throne
1851 (1 February) Mary dies in London at the age of fifty-three
FRANKENSTEIN: 1818 AND 1831
Frankenstein was first published anonymously in 1818, with a Preface written by Percy Bysshe
Shelley. It was subsequently published in revised form with Mary Shelley's Author's Introduction in
1831. The changes made to the text were not just matters of style, as Shelley claims they were in this
Introduction (p. 10). They include the addition of an inner life for Victor which portrays him slightly
more sympathetically, the general softening of the characters and the revision of family and blood-
ties so that Elizabeth is no longer Victor's first cousin and is much more angelic. The Introduction
also attempted to influence the reception of the novel by encouraging the reader to view Victor's
crime as a crime against God, something not suggested in the early version. The changes may
indicate the differences between the free-thinking nineteen-year-old of 1818 and the mature and
conservative woman who revised the novel and wrote the Introduction in 1831.
, A LITERARY FAMILY
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein frequently reveals the influence of her parents' ideas. Her father,
William Godwin (1756–1836), was the author of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), which
condemned all human institutions as corrupt and championed reason as the guide to realising an
ideal state. These ideas were published in fictional form in his Caleb Williams (1794). Mary Shelley's
mother, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97), was the author of A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman (1792) in which she condemned false and excessive sensibility and argued for the rights of
women to receive a proper rational education.
Mary Shelley's husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), was one of the major Romantic poets
and was known for his political radicalism. He abandoned his pregnant first wife, Harriet, to run off
with the sixteen-year-old Mary. Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine in Hyde Park in 1816, and
Mary and Percy were subsequently married. Some critics have argued for Percy as a collaborator
with Mary on Frankenstein, or at least an influential editor.
BIRTH AND DEATH
Childbirth was closely associated with death in Mary Shelley's life. Her own mother, Mary
Wollstonecraft, died ten days after Mary's birth. The year after eloping with Percy Shelley, Mary gave
birth to a premature daughter who died soon afterwards. A son, William, was born in 1816, and a
daughter, Clara, in 1817; both were dead by 1819 when Mary gave birth to Percy Florence Shelley,
her only child to survive into adulthood. In 1822, Mary was again pregnant, but she miscarried,
losing so much blood that she nearly died.
THE RISE OF GOTHIC FICTION
Gothic literature emerged partly in reaction to the Enlightenment, the eighteenth-century
championing of the powers of reason, the privileging of science and rejection of superstition. The
founding text is generally agreed to be Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764). In the 1790s,
Gothic became primarily associated with, on the one hand, the terror romances of Ann Radcliffe,
such as The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), with their beleaguered heroines, mysterious castles and
threatening aristocratic villains, and, on the other, with the more violent and horrific reworkings of
these romances in fictions like Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796). In these early Gothic works, evil is
generally located primarily within an external source, in, for example, such horrifying figures as
ghosts and demons, or in such oppressive institutions as the Roman Catholic church as demonised at
the time by English Protestantism.
With Frankenstein, however, and under the influence of Romanticism, Gothic turns inward, focusing
more on the evil within. The haunted castle is replaced by the haunted individual and this leads to
the emergence of the double as a key Gothic trope: the embodiment of an irreparable division in the
human psyche. In this respect, Frankenstein looks forward to such later well-known fictions as Oscar
Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde (1886).
CHECK THE BOOK
Mary Shelley's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote an unfinished Gothic novel, Maria, or the
Wrongs of Women, published posthumously in 1798. The story of a woman placed in a mental
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