Changing the Map: Puppies, Precociousness, and a Heart in a Box

Credit: Unknown Woman, formerly known as Mary Shelley by Samuel John Stump © National Portrait Gallery, London

There are many things you probably already know about Mary Wollstonecraft (née Godwin) Shelley, author of Frankenstein, and the creator-mother of the Science Fiction genre. For example, you probably know that her mother was the noted radical and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) and that her father, William Godwin wrote what many consider the first detective novel, Caleb Williams (1794).

She would marry the famous Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, survive the deaths of four children and Percy, and continue to write until she died at age 53.

And we also all know that she wrote Frankenstein when she was 18, over one particularly strange summer in Switzerland, thanks (at least for me) to the movie Gothic.

But here are some of the things you may not know about the map’s creator, including puppies, precociousness, and a heart in a box.

• Although you may know her mother died shortly after giving birth to Mary (who they’d been convinced would be a boy named William, thus provoking surprise), you probably don’t know that after the doctor refused to allow her to breastfeed – and thus puppies were procured to relieve her of excess milk. (Seymour, 28)
• From age eight to twelve Mary listened in on brilliant discussions about ghosts and unexplained physical manifestations of spirits from other worlds. She developed a keen interest in the occult, devouring the part of her father’s library devot­ed to the subject.
• 13-year-old Mary, educated by her father, (who advocated the proper way to read being three or more books at the same time) wrote weekly lectures for her 8-year-old brother William to present to guests in the style of Coleridge. (Mellor, 11)
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  Credit: Percy Bysshe Shelley by Unknown artist © National Portrait Gallery, London

  Percy Bysshe Shelley left his pregnant wife, Harriet for Mary. He also reported falling in love with her pathetic smile, and “wildness and sublimity of her feelings.” (Seymour, 92)

• They confessed their love for each other at a visit to her mother’s grave. She was then sixteen. 26th June, 1814. (Seymour 98)
• Before he left Harriet, after being rebuffed by Mary’s father, William, Percy burst into Mary’s room and with a pistol, and tried to convince her to take a lethal dose of laudanum so that they could be together forever. (Seymour, 97)
• They ran away together to Europe, joined by Mary’s stepsister, Jane. The trio decided to attempt a free-love commune in Switzerland, where Shelley graciously told Mary she could decide if Harriet (Percy’s wife, now pregnant) could join them. Alas, the Swiss were having none of it. (They would come back later, with even more complicated relationships, and including Byron and Polidori). Seymour 109.
• The three returned to England. Mary became pregnant and gave birth prematurely in February of 1815. Her first daughter died less then a month later of convulsions. During her grief, she came across a curious account from the 1814 Edinburgh Review of a sailor who was restored to life after a seven-month coma by after being trepanned (a surgical procedure in which holes are drilled into the skull). Seymour 130
• Mary was appalled by the plight of Africans in Great Britain. The nameless creature of Frankenstein is composed of the parts of a multitude of races, deliberately to provoke discussions on the subject of discrimination. (Seymour 139)
• Her journal for the month (August) she wrote the majority of Frankenstein (apparently having not yet heard that NaNiWriMo takes place in November) in Geneva is regrettably, mysteriously, completely lost. (Seymour 148)
• After Percy’s death at sea, his multiple lovers and friends dug up his corpse in order to create what the group deemed a fitting farewell – a funeral pyre. However, they forgot quicklime, when burned, creates a brilliant blue flame. The group (Bryon, Trelawny, Hunt, Mary) had planned to keep relics of the body, but the intense heat turned the body to ash. Byron did grab Percy’s skull (which disintegrated in his hands). Trawlawney burned his hands getting part of a jawbone. Hunt got the unburned heart, which he later refused to surrender to Mary. Mary was later able to shame him into giving it to her. (Seymour, 306)
• Before she got the heart from Hunt, he kept it in a glass box, preserved with wine, and wrote sonnets to it. (Bieri, 655)
• Mary tried to have her son’s body interred with Percy’s – and went to Italy to exhume. They couldn’t find the body – but found instead a grown man’s corpse in her son’s grave. (Bieri, 656)
• Frankenstein gained fame as a “monstrous drama” By the end of 1823, no less then five versions were being performed. Frankenstein has always had a visual influence. (Seymour, 334).
• Mary had writer’s block before Frankenstein appeared to her in a waking dream.

I busied myself to think of a story,—a story to rival those which had excited us to this task. One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart. If I did not accomplish these things, my ghost story would be unworthy of its name. I thought and pondered—vainly. I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations. Have you thought of a story? I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Introduction to Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (London: Colburn and Bentle; Standard Novels Edition, 1831, p. Xi)

• The most famous dream in literary history occurred June 16th, 1816. Immortalized in the film Gothic, Mary fell into reverie, “the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together,” and felt the terror of her dream take life.
• Frankenstein was published on New Year’s Day 1818. There are three distinct versions – the original manuscript, the published 1818 edition, and the revised 1831 edition. (Mellor, 39)
• Percy Bysshe Shelley significantly edited the manuscript, deliberately elaborating and elevating the language. (So the parts of the book where it tends to go on are probably Percy’s fault). (Mellor, 63)
• After a long history of ill-health and homeopathic attempts at remedies, Mary lapsed into a coma January 23, for eight days, and died February 1. The death certificate confirmed Mary Shelley’s death stemmed from brain damage – a tumor in the left cerebral hemisphere noted to be of long-standing. (Seymour, 538)

References:

Seymour, Miranda. Mary Shelley. New York: Grove Press. 2000.

Bieri, James. Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography. The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore. 2004.

Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. Routledge: New York. 1989.