Lives of the Great Romantics, Part III, Volume 3

Harriet Devine Jump, Pamela Clemit, Betty T Bennett, John Mullan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000748307
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume sheds light on contemporary perception of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, a biographically and intellectually compelling literary family of the Romantic period. The writings reveal the personalities of the subjects, and the motives and agendas of the biographers.

Walter Scott, ‘Review of Frankenstein’ in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 2 (March 1818)

Frankenstein was published in London on 1 January 1818. Even before publication, P. B. Shelley had been concerned that the anonymous work be widely reviewed. He would not, however, send any of the copies he purchased to any reviewers (Jones, vol. 1, p. 590), expecting Lackington to provide the novel to the usual journals to attract attention and sales. Lackington widely distributed copies, sending it to the conservativeQuarterly Review as well as the liberalExaminer – although Hunt already had a copy of the novel, provided him by the Shelleys. Lackington may well have also sent a copy directly toBlackwood’s Edinburgh Review, but P. B. Shelley, on 2 January, personally sent a copy to Walter Scott, no doubt hoping Godwin’s friend would be sufficiently impressed to write a review, whichBlackwood’s would certainly publish (Jones, vol. 1, p. 590).

As P. B. Shelley’s letter to Scott explained, the ‘Author has requested’ him to send it ‘as a slight tribute of high admiration & respect’ (Jones, vol. 1, p. 590). Scott inferred that P. B. Shelley had himself written the novel, assuming that his reference to its ‘Author’ was mere reserve on his part. Any reserve was quite unnecessary as far as Scott was concerned. He not only understood the social and psychological implications ofFrankenstein, but was deeply impressed with this novel in the Godwinian school that meant to explore and alter traditional European codes of conduct.

In his glowing review, Scott praises the intentions and abilities of ‘the author’s original genius and happy power of expression.’ His extensive quotations from the novel are contextualised by commentary that gives the novel the serious consideration it merits but often, after the discovery was made that its author was a women, did not receive. From Mary Shelley’s perspective, the only adverse aspect of the review was that it named P. B. Shelley as the author, an error that has haunted the critical history of the novel and its author.

In 1818, Mary Shelley wrote to Scott from Italy to correct the record, in a letter that is appreciative of his accolades, but resolute in her ownership of those accolades (Bennett,MWSL, vol. 1, p. 71):

Sir

Having received from the publisher of Frankenstein the notice taken of that work in Blackwood’s magasine, and intelligence at the same time that it was to your kindness that I owed this favourable notice I hasten to return my acknowledgements and thanks, and at the same time to express the pleasure I receive from approbation of so high a value as yours.

M^r Shelley soon after its publication took the liberty of sending you a copy but as both he and I thought in a manner which would prevent you from supposing that he was the author we were surprised therefore to see him mentioned in the notice as the probable author, – I am anxious to prevent your continuing in the mistake of supposing M^r Shelley guilty of a juvenile attempt of mine; to which – from its being written at an early age, I abstained from putting my name – and from respect to those persons from whom I bear it. I have therefore kept it concealed except from a few friends.

I beg you will pardon the intrusion of this explanation –

Your obliged &c &c

Mary Wollst^ft Shelley.

On the strength of that review, years later, when Mary Shelley was looking for material about Scotland for her 1830 novel,Perkin Warbeck, she wrote to Scott for any suggestions he could provide (Bennett,MWSL, vol. 2, p. 78). The question arises whether Scott would have reviewedFrankenstein the same way, had he known it was written by a woman. But Scott cleared up that question a few years later, when he compared the novel with one of his own. James BaUantyne, in hisThe Journal of Sir Walter Scott, 1825-32 (new edn, Edinburgh, 1910) noted Scott as saying that he ‘greatly preferred Mrs. Shelley’sFrankenstein to any of his own romances. I remember one day, when Mr. Erskine and I were dining with him, either immediately before or immediately after the publication of one of the best of the [his] latter [romances], and were giving it the high praise we thought it deserved, he asked us abruptly whether we had readFrankenstein. We answered that we had not. “Ah,” he said, “have patience, readFrankenstein, and you will be better able to judge of —.”’ Ironically, while so many critics have failed to recognize the true author ofFrankenstein, and its true genius, Walter Scott was not among them.

To make more clear the distinction we have endeavoured to draw between the marvellous and the effects of the marvellous, considered as separate objects, we may briefly invite our readers to compare the common tale of Tom Thumb with Gulliver’s Voyage to Brobdingnag; one of the most childish fictions, with one which is pregnant with wit and satire, yet both turning upon the same assumed possibility of the existence of a pigmy among a race of giants. In the former case, when the imagination of the story-teller has exhausted itself in every species of hyperbole, in order to describe the diminutive size of his hero, the interest of the tale is at an end; but in the romance of the Dean of St Patrick’s, the exquisite humour with which the natural consequences of so strange and unusual a situation is detailed, has a canvass on which to expand itself, as broad as the luxuriance even of the author’s talents could desire. Gulliver stuck into a marrow bone, and Master Thomas Thumb’s disastrous fall into the bowl of hasty-pudding, are, in the general outline, kindred incidents; but the jest is exhausted in the latter case, when the accident is told; whereas in the former, it lies not so much in the comparatively pigmy size which subjected Gulliver to such a ludicrous misfortune, as in the tone of grave and dignified feeling with which he resents the disgrace of the incident.

In the class of fictitious narrations to which we allude, the author opens a sort of account-current with the reader; drawing upon him, in the first place, for credit to that degree of the marvellous which he proposes to employ; and becoming virtually bound, in consequence of this indulgence, that his personages shall conduct themselves, in the extraordinary circumstances in which they ore placed, according to the rules or probability, and the nature of the human heart. In this view, theprobable is far from being laid out or sight even amid the wildest freaks of imagination; on the contrary, we grant the extraordinary postulates which the author demands as the foundation of his narrative, only on condition of his deducing the consequences with logical precison.

We have only to add, that this class of fiction has been sometimes applied to the purposes of political satire, and sometimes to the general illustration of the powers and workings of the human mind. Swift, Bergerac, and others, have employed it for the former purpose, and a good illustration of the latter is the well known Saint Leon of William Godwin. In this latter work, assuming the possibility of the transmutation of metals, and of theelixir vitœ, the author has deduced, in the course of his narrative, the probable consequences of the possession of such secrets upon the fortunes and mind of him who might enjoy them. Frankenstein is a novel upon the same plan with Saint Leon; it is said to be written by Mr Percy Bysshe Shelley, who, if we are rightly informed, is son-in-law to Mr Godwin; and it is inscribed to that ingenious author.

In the preface, the author lays claim to rank his work among the class which we have endeavoured to describe.

“The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed by Dr Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence, I shall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination; vet, in assuming it as the basis of a work of fancy, I have not considered myself as merely weaving a scries of supernatural terrors. The event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment It was recommended by the novelty of the situations which it developes; and, however impossible as a physical fact, affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield.

“I have thus endeavoured to preserve the truth of the elementary principles of human nature, while I have not scrupled to innovate upon their combinations. TheIliad, the tragic poetry of Greece,—Shakespeare, in theTempest andMidsummer Night’s Dream,—and most especially Milton, inParadise Lost, conform to this rule; and the most humble novellist, who sceks to confer or receive amusement from his labours, may, without presumption, apply to prosefiction a license, or rather a rule, the adoption of which so many exquisite combinations of human feeling have resulted in the highest specimens of poetry.”

We shall, without farther preface, detail the particulars of the singular story, which is thus introduced.

* * *

So concludes this extraordinary tale, in which the author seems to us to disclose uncommon powers of poetic imagination. The feeling with which we perused the unexpected and fearful, yet, allowing the possibility of the event, very natural conclusion of Frankenstein’s experiment, shook a little even our firm nerves; although such and so numerous have been the expedients for exciting terror employed by the romantic writers of the age, that the reader may adopt Macbeth’s words with a slight alteration:

We have supp’d full with horror: Direness, familiar to our “callous” thoughts, Cannot once startle us.”

It is no slight merit in our eyes, that 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, as if it were necessary that the language should be as extravagant as the fiction. The ideas of the author are always clearly as well as forcibly expressed; and his descriptions of landscape have in them the choice requisites of truth, freshness, precision, and beauty. The self-education of the monster, considering the slender opportunities of acquiring knowledge that he possessed, we nave already noticed as improbable and overstrained. That he should have riot only learned to speak, but to read, and, for aught we know, to Write—that he should have become acquainted with Werter’, with Plutarch’s Lives, and with Paradise Lost, by listening through a hole in a wall, seems as unlikely as that he should have acquired, in the same way, the problems of Euclid, or the art of book-keeping by single and double entry. The author has however two apologies—the first, the necessity that his monster should acquire these endowments, and the other, that his neighbours were engaged in teaching the language of the country to a young foreigner. His progress in self-knowledge, and the acquisition of information, is, after all, more wonderful than that of Hai Eben Yokhdan, or Auttomathes, or the hero of the little romance called The Child of Nature, one of which works might perhaps suggest the train of ideas followed by me author of Frankenstein. We should also be disposed, in support of the principles with which we set out, to question whether the monster, how tall, agile, and strong however, could have perpetrated so much mischief undiscovered, or passed through to many countries without being secured, either on account of his crimes, or for the benefit of some such speculator as Mr Polito, who would have been happy to have added to his museum so curious a specimen of natural history. But as we have consented to admit the leading incident of the work, perhaps some of our raiders may be of opinion, that to stickle upon lesser improbabilities, is to incur the censure bestowed by the Scottish proverb on those who start at straws after swallowingwindlings.

The following lines, which occur in the second volume, mark, we think, that the author possesses the same facility in expressing himself in verse as in prose.

We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep.

We rise; one wand ring thought pollutes the day.

We fed, conceive, or reason; laugh, or weep,

Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away;

It is the same: for, be it joy or sorrow.

The path of its departure still is free.

Man’s yesterday mayne’er belike his morrow;

Nought may endure but mutability!

Upon the whole, the work impresses us with a high idea of the author’s original genius and happy power of expression. We shall be delighted to hear that he has aspired to thepaullo majora; and in the meantime, congratulate our readers upon a novel which excites new reflections and untried sources of emotion. If Gray’s definition of Paradise, to lie on a couch, namely, and read new novels, come any thing near truth, no small praise is due to him, who, like the author of Frankenstein, has enlarged, the sphere of that fascinating enjoyment.

Thomas Medwin, Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron (London, 1824)

Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Review of Frankenstein; or; The Modern Prometheus’ in The Atheneeum (November 1832)

In 1824, Thomas Medwin (1788–1869), author and P. B. Shelley’s second cousin, wroteConversations, based on his brief friendship with Byron at Pisa, which began on 21 November 1821. Born and raised at Horsham, two miles from Shelley’s family home at Field Place, the cousins were childhood friends. Like Shelley, Medwin had early literary aspirations, and the two collaborated on a Gothic tale (now lost) in 1809–10. Medwin first studied law, but gave that up to join the 24th Light Dragoons, in the purchased positions of Cornet (1812) and then lieutenant (1813), serving in India between 1813 and 1818, when he returned to England (Lovell, pp. 24, 55).

The cousins met again after a seven-year interval in October 1820 in Pisa. Shelley was initially happy to have Medwin’s company, but both Shelleys soon found him a bore (‘Seccatura’) (Bennett,MWSL, vol. 1, p. 178). In November 1821, Shelley introduced Medwin to Byron at Pisa. Their brief association was the basis of Medwin’sConversations, which was heatedly attacked by Byron’s closest friends as spurious. The controversy between Medwin and Byron’s friends became public and rose to the point of a threatened duel.¹ The flurry of acrimony that followed its publication probably influenced the sale of the volume, which appeared in six English editions in eight years. It was also published in America and translated into French and German (Lovell, pp. 176–92). John Cam Hobhouse, later Baron Broughton (1786–1869), English statesman, and Byron’s close friend and confidant, heatedly responded to Medwin’s book with his pamphlet,Exposure of the Mis-statements Contained in Captain Medwin’s Pretended ‘Conversations of Lord Byron. Hobhouse asked that Mary Shelley review what he had written for inaccuracies, which she willingly did. She had refused, however, to correct Medwin’s manuscript and had asked him not to publish his memoir of Shelley, which she thought ‘one mass of mistakes’ (Bennett,MWSL, vol. 1, pp. 454–6). The publisher John Murray declined topublish the pamphlet; it appeared instead as an anonymous review in the January 1825Westminster Review.²

Mary Shelley noted that ‘Medwin’s book made a great sensation,’ but she was most unhappy about it because, as far as she was concerned, Medwin had ‘pub...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Edition
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Bibliography
• Chronology
• Copy Texts
• 1. Scott, Walter, ‘Review of Frankenstein in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
• 2. Medwin, Thomas, Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron
• 3. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, ‘Review of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus’ in The Athenæum
• 4. Clairmont, Claire, ‘Letter to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’
• 5. Allsop, Thomas (ed.), Letters, Conversations and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge
• 6. ‘M’, ‘Review of Falkner’ in Monthly Repository
• 7. Burr, Aaron, The Private Journal of Aaron Burr
• 8. Anonymous, ‘Review of The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley’ and ‘Essays, Letters from Abroad, translations and Fragments by Percy Bysshe Shelley’ in The Athenæum
• 9. Horne, Richard, A New Spirit of the Age
• 10. Medwin, Thomas, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley
• 11. Medwin, Thomas, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, A New Edition
• 12. Gilfillan, George, ‘Female Authors, no. 3, Mrs. Shelley’ in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine
• 13. Redding, Cyrus, Fifty Years’ Recollections
• 14. Hogg, Thomas Jefferson, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley
• 15. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, ‘Letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg’
• 16. Trelawny, Edward, Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron
• 17. Shelley, Lady [Jane] (ed.), Shelley Memorials
• 18. Rennie, Eliza, Traits of Character
• 19. Mérimée, Prosper, ‘Letter to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’
• 20. Hunt, Thornton, ‘Shelley By One Who Knew Him’ in The Atlantic Monthly
• 21. Owen, Robert Dale, Threading My Way
• 22. Clarke, Charles & Mary Cowden, Recollections of Writers
• 23. Sumner, Charles, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner
• 24. Perkins, Jane Gray, The Life of Mrs. Norton
• 25. Polidori, John William, The Diary of Dr. John Polidori
• 26. Jewsbury, Maria Jane, ‘Letter to Anna Jameson’
• 27. Godwin, William, ‘Letter to William Baxter’
• 28. Haden, A. C., ‘Mary Shelley: A Local Reminiscence’ in Dundee Advertiser
• Editorial Notes
• Index