Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (16 page)

When boating was over Byron and Polidori joined Shelley’s party for tea and conversation, either in the drawing room at Diodati or in the less grand confines of Montalègre. Little William – now six months old – was shuttled between the two houses; looked after by his mother, his aunt and the nursemaid who travelled to Geneva with them. Byron seems to have consented to a very brief renewal of his liaison with Claire. After all, she was available and all too eager and, as he told his friend Douglas Kinnaird some months later, ‘if a girl of eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours – there is but one way.’
²⁶
 Polidori developed a crush on Mary, but she treated him like a younger brother. It was particularly galling to be told this was how she thought of him a few days after he jumped from a wall in an effort to impress her, spraining his ankle badly in the process (at the advanced age of twenty-one, Polidori still seemed younger than worldly-wise, eighteen year old Mary). Mary herself was most contented by the life she was leading. A few days before Byron’s arrival she wrote to Fanny of her delight at her new surroundings: ‘We do not enter into society here, yet our time passes swiftly and delightfully. We read Latin and Italian during the heats of noon, and when the sun declines we walk in the garden of the hotel, looking at the rabbits relieving fallen cockchaffers, and watching the motions of a myriad of lizards, who inhabit a southern wall of the garden . . . I feel as happy as a new-fledged bird, and hardly care what twig I fly to, so that I may try my new-found wings.’
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She liked Byron and found the combination of his and Shelley’s company stimulating. It was a shame that Fanny responded with dreary, slightly sentimental letters and that Godwin’s finances continued to cause anxiety, but it was hard to engage with the woes of the Skinner Street inhabitants when one was hundreds of miles away watching lizards in a sun-drenched garden.

One of the better known facts about this most famous of literary summers is that nothing stayed sun-drenched for very long. In one of Mary’s most anthologised letters she described the freak weather which put an end to the Swiss sunshine.

Unfortunately we do not now enjoy those brilliant skies that hailed us on our first arrival to this country. An almost perpetual rain confines us principally to the house; but when the sun bursts forth it is with a splendour and heat unknown in England. The thunder storms that visit us are grander and more terrific than I have ever seen before . . . one night we
enjoyed
a finer storm than I had ever before beheld. The lake was lit up – the pines on Jura made visible, and all the scene illuminated for an instant, when a pitchy blackness succeeded, and the thunder came in frightful bursts over our heads amid the darkness.
²⁸

Boating expeditions became impossible, so the group retreated inside to talk and read.  Shelley and Byron discussed Plato, Rousseau and Wordsworth, and Shelley tried to convince Byron that the disappointment of Wordsworth’s apostatical later work should not obscure the genius of his early creations. In July the two poets disappeared off on a jaunt of their own around Lake Geneva, visiting Clarens, the setting of Rousseau’s great novel
Julie
, and touring the house in which Gibbon had completed his
Decline and Fall
.
Mary and Polidori read Tasso together and the whole group spent one evening reading German ghost stories and Coleridge’s
Christabel
. Polidori, who had written his doctoral thesis on somnambulism, discussed ‘principles’ with Shelley, and ‘whether man was to be thought merely an instrument’. Elsewhere he reported that Shelley and he talked, ‘till the ladies brains whizzed with giddiness about idealism.’
²⁹

It is altogether too tempting to shape a neat narrative about where these conversations were leading. Mary did exactly this in her Preface to the 1831 edition of
Frankenstein
. There she described how Byron decreed that everyone should write a ghost story. She recalled her embarrassment when no ideas came to her, and the evening in which Byron and Shelley discussed the work of Erasmus Darwin ‘who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion’ while she sat ‘a devout but nearly silent listener’. She went on to dramatise the night which followed, describing how she saw ‘the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show
signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.’

Finally, she described the triumphant moment in which she was able to announce to the others she ‘had thought of a story’. Shelley was accorded praise for encouraging her to develop her story into a novel, and she concluded her account with the following valediction:

And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart. Its several pages speak of many a walk, many a drive, and many a conversation, when I was not alone; and my companion was one who, in this world, I shall never see more.
³⁰

This narrative of creativity has become nearly as famous as the novel whose creation it describes, and it has received almost as much critical attention from generations of scholars who have sought to unpick the complicated chain of influences which underpinned Mary’s extraordinary first novel. We now know that the events which led to the composition of
Frankenstein
were less cohesive and dramatically satisfactory than Mary’s Preface suggests and that the reading and conversations of the whole of the Swiss summer played their part in the novel’s development. But it is also the case that in
Frankenstein
Mary brought together ideas which had been germinating for years. The summer of 1816 provided an ideal context in which to knit these ideas together, but conversations about ghosts and galvanism were by no means solely responsible for her novel.

In the companionable atmosphere of the Villa Diodati, Mary began to synthesise Godwin’s narratives of historical perfectibility, Wollstonecraft’s visions of parental responsibility, and Shelley’s materialist philosophy of the origins of life (a philosophy which owed much to Erasmus Darwin). She did so in an imaginative response which incorporated years of reading, a new understanding of the power of electricity (gained from watching the lightning reverberate around the lake) and a claim for the importance of creative community. It also incorporated images which had been bubbling away in her conversations for several years. Charles Clairmont’s 1815 letter to Claire in which he described Shelley and Hogg poring over the artificial and natural boundaries of human knowledge’ gives one indication of the kind of imagery delighted in by the Shelley circle at the time; a similar glimpse into a shared linguistic register survives in one of Claire’s early letters to Byron, in which she informed him that ‘the Creator ought not to destroy his Creature’.
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These images and turns of phrase, developed and used communally over a period of years, would all find their way into
Frankenstein
.

Frankenstein
, like Shelley’s
Alastor
, is a critique of selfish, isolated creativity. It tells the story of a young man who creates a living being from human remains, only to discover the limits of his power over his creation. Frankenstein brings about his downfall through an act of self-aggrandising creation which is characterised by his failure to consider the social ramifications of his actions. He rejects the communal, institutional context of the University of Ingolstadt to lurk in charnel houses and his attic room in pursuit of personal glory.
Frankenstein
condemns much of what Byron’s
Childe Harold
represents: isolation, self-indulgence and an abnegation of social responsibility. It is Mary’s manifesto for the idealised community of enlightened individuals she and Shelley attempted to assemble, first in the winter of 1814, then more successfully at the house in Bishopsgate in 1815. Her description in the elegiac Preface of the process by which
Frankenstein
came into being may elide some details, but it champions a method of endeavour in which ideas reach fruition through ‘many a walk, many a drive, many a conversation’ – a method entirely absent from the novel itself. Indirectly, through its representation of the possibility of what might have been, her novel is a celebration of the communal, inspiring summer in which it emerged.

Shelley played a key role in the development of
Frankenstein
. Together he and Mary discussed its plot, its intellectual antecedents and its emerging form. He acted as her agent, searching for a publisher and correcting some of the proofs, and he edited her drafts, making many emendations and revisions in the process. His script is interlinked with hers in the pages of the
Frankenstein
manuscript, transforming it into a powerful symbol of cooperative creativity. Many of Shelley’s changes concerned tone and style, but some were thematically substantive and they reveal surprising things about the dynamic of Mary and Shelley’s relationship.

Shelley’s alterations consistently emphasised
Frankenstein
’s insistence on the necessity of a socially responsible pursuit of knowledge. He highlighted Frankenstein’s naïve enthusiasm for alchemy; an enthusiasm which isolates him from the University of Ingolstadt and contributes to his downfall. In several places Shelley added whole sentences to the narrative. For example: ‘The ambition of the enquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur, for realities of little worth.’
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 Shelley’s language – ‘annihilation’, ‘grandeur’, ‘little worth’ – points towards the extent of Frankenstein’s delusional attachment to his visions, and suggests he perceives modern science as a violent destroyer of dreams. Another Shelley addition, in which Frankenstein’s investigations lead him to see ‘all the minutiae of causation as exemplified in the change from life to death, and death to life’,
³³
increases his responsibility for his own downfall. Frankenstein’s neatly weighted rhetoric makes the shift from life to death seem inconsequential, and it is only through the murders of his own family that he comes to realise his mistake.

Shelley’s involvement in shaping
Frankenstein
’s rejection of the Romantic solitary creator (a figure epitomised by his own
Alastor)
is striking. Shelley was a good editor: he strengthened and sharpened Mary’s critique of selfish genius, but did not seek to impose his own ambivalence about the creator’s need for both solitude and sociability on to her work. Through the creation of a manuscript with two hands, in which the second hand consistently emphasised the value of social responsibility, Mary and Shelley established an alternative model for creative endeavour to that practiced by Frankenstein himself. Since the early 1970s Shelley has been alternately praised and censured for his work on
Frankenstein
, his supporters attributing the novel’s power to his pen, and his detractors condemning his alterations as an act of patriarchal oppression.
³⁴
But the manuscript supports neither view. The novel’s greatness lies in the intensity of its plot and in its virtuosic response to Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Darwin and Shelley himself, whose alterations are those of a sympathetic and careful reader, rather than of a man attempting to impose his intellectual philosophy on to a woman’s work. In fact, the
Frankenstein
manuscript reveals co-operative Romantic sociability at its best: equitable, constructive, sympathetic and incisive. It is a testament to the characters of both Mary and Shelley – and to the strength of their relationship – that they worked so well together.

While Mary formulated her ideas into the beginnings of a novel, Byron and Shelley directed their shared reading and conversations into poetry. For Shelley, the intellectual impact of touring Lake Geneva worked itself into his ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, the poem in which he made his first sustained attempt to formulate a version of neo-Platonism modulated through both Rousseau and Wordsworth. Conversations about the first generation of Romantic poets influenced his second major poem of the summer, ‘Mont Blanc’, in which he rewrote Coleridge’s conception of a Christian sublime (articulated in the elder poet’s ‘Hymn before Sunrise, Written in the Vale of Chamouni’) so that the sublime was transformed into a symbol of the limits of human knowledge. Both he and Mary were most impressed by Byron’s work, and watched the progress of
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
eagerly. One evening Shelley read Mary the early sections of the poem’s third canto in their little bedroom at Montalègre after the others had gone to bed, and thereafter she associated the canto with listening to Shelley’s voice as she watched the sky darken over Lake Geneva and the mountains.