Frankenstein File
Compiled by David S. Miall, University of Alberta
Percy's Revisions to the 1818 edition
Mary's Revisions for the 1831 edition
Reviews of 1818 edition
Background Documents
Percy Bysshe Shelley made numerous revisions to the manuscript of Frankenstein before publication. A detailed discussion is provided by Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York and London: Routledge, 1988). A small sample of her evidence is provided below.
For example, here is one passage by Mary:
Nor were these my only visions. The raising of ghosts or devils was also a favorite pursuit and if I never saw any I attributed it rather to my own inexperience and mistakes than want of skill in my instructors.
This passage is revised by Percy:
Nor were these my only visions. The raising of ghosts or devils was a promise liberally accorded by my favorite authors, the fulfillment of which I most eagerly sought; and if my incantations were always unsuccessful, I attributed the failure rather to my own inexperience and mistake, than to a want of skill or fidelity in my instructors. (Reader, p. 30)
Mellor notes that Percy consistently changes Mary's colloquial language to his "more learned, polysyllabic terms" (p. 60). In her table of revisions, shown below in part, Mary's term on the left is replaced by Percy's term on the right:
MARY PERCY have possess wish desire, purpose caused derive their origin from a painting a representation place station plenty of sufficient time period felt endured hope confidence had experienced stay remain took away extinguish talked conversed For other evidence see also the Appendix to Mellor's study.
Mary Shelley hoped that a new, cheap edition of Frankenstein would be issued by the publisher Bentley. To make the novel more acceptable, she revised it extensively. The changes are conveniently tabulated in Appendix B of Frankenstein 1818, ed. Marilyn Butler (Oxford, 1994). Here is one example, starting at the passage shown above, in which a substantial section has been deleted:
1818 1831 Nor were these my only visions. The raising of ghosts or devils was a promise liberally accorded by my favourite authors, the fulfilment of which I most eagerly sought; and if my incantations were always unsuccessful, I attributed the failure rather to my own inexperience and mistake, than to a want of skill or fidelity in my instructors.
The natural phaenomena that take place every day before our eyes did not escape my examinations. Distillation, and the wonderful effects of steam, processes of which my favourite authors were utterly ignorant, excited my astonishment; but my utmost wonder was engaged by some experiments on an airpump, which I saw employed by a gentleman whom we were in the habit of visiting.
The ignorance of the early philosophers on these and several other points served to decrease their credit with me: but I could not entirely throw them aside, before some other system should occupy their place in my mind.
When I was about fifteen years old . . .
Nor were these my only visions. The raising of ghosts or devils was a promise liberally accorded by my favourite authors) the fulfilment of which I most eagerly sought; and if my incantations were always unsuccessful, I attributed the failure rather to my own inexperience and mistake, than to a want of skill or fidelity in my instructors. And thus for a time I was occupied by exploded systems, mingling, like an unadept, a thousand contradictory theories, and floundering desperately in a very slough of multifarious knowledge, guided by an ardent imagination and childish reasoning, till an accident again changed the current of my ideas.
When I was about fifteen years old . . .
Some example comments from reviews of the first edition of Frankenstein are provided here. For the complete reviews see under Mary Shelley in the Gothic section of the Romanticism CD-ROM (in Rutherford S.).
Our readers will guess from this summary, what a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity this work presents. -- It is piously dedicated to Mr. Godwin, and is written in the spirit of his school. The dreams of insanity are embodied in the strong and striking language of the insane, and the author, notwithstanding the rationality of his preface, often leaves us in doubt whether he is not as mad as his hero. -- Quarterly Review 18 (January, 1818).
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 hyperbolic 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. -- Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 2 (March, 1818); review by Walter Scott.
Here is one of the productions of the modern school in its highest style of caricature and exaggeration. It is formed on the Godwinian manner, and has all the faults, but many likewise of the beauties of that model. In dark and gloomy views of nature and of man, bordering too closely on impiety, -- in the most outrageous improbability, -- in sacrificing every thing to effect, -- it even goes beyond its great prototype; but in return, it possesses a similar power of fascination, something of the same mastery in harsh and savage delineations of passion, relieved in like manner by the gentler features of domestic and simple feelings. There never was a wilder story imagined, yet, like most of the fictions of this age, it has an air of reality attached to it, by being connected with the favourite projects and passions of the times. -- Edinburgh Magazine New Series 2 (March, 1818)
We need scarcely say, that these volumes have neither principle, object, nor moral; the horror which abounds in them is too grotesque and bizarre ever to approach near the sublime, and when we did not hurry over the pages in disgust, we sometimes paused to laugh outright; and yet we suspect, that the diseased and wandering imagination, which has stepped out of all legitimate bounds, to frame these disjointed combinations and unnatural adventures, might be disciplined into something better. -- British Critic 9 (April, 1818).
Background documents
Evils of Society. Rousseau, Émile (1762), p. 1. Trans. Barbara Foxley.
God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil. He forces one soil to yield the products of another, one tree to bear another's fruit. He confuses and confounds time, place, and natural conditions. He mutilates his dog, his horse, and his slave. He destroys and defaces all things; he loves all that is deformed and monstrous; he will have nothing as nature made it, not even man himself, who must learn his paces like a saddle-horse, and be shaped to his master's taste like the trees in his garden.
Yet things would be worse without this education, and mankind cannot be made by halves. Under existing conditions a man left to himself from birth would be more of a monster than the rest. Prejudice, authority, necessity, example, all the social conditions into which we are plunged, would stifle nature in him and put nothing in her place. She would be like a sapling chance sown in the midst of the highway, bent hither and thither and soon crushed by the passers-by.
Exploring towards the North Pole. From Daines Barrington, Miscellanies (London, 1781).
The celebrated Mr. Boyle, from these and many other instances, rejected the long received notion that the Pole was the principle of cold. Captain Jonas Poole, who in 1610 sailed in a vessel of seventy tons to make discoveries towards the North, found the weather warm in near seventy-nine degrees of latitude, whilst the ponds and lakes were unfrozen, which put him in hopes of finding a mild summer, and led him to believe, that a passage might be as soon found by the Pole as any other way whatever; and for this reason, that the Sun gave a great heat there, and that the ice was not near so thick as what he had met with in the latitude of seventy-three. Indeed, the Dutchmen, who pretend to have advanced within a degree of the Pole, said it was as hot there as in the summer at Amsterdam.
Humphry Davy. From A Discourse introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry (1802).
As a branch of sublime philosophy, chemistry is far from being perfect. It consists of a number of collections of facts connected together by different relations; but as yet it is not furnished with a precise and beautiful theory. Though we can perceive, develope, and even produce, by means of our instruments of experiment, an almost infinite variety of minute phænomena, yet we are incapable of determining the general laws by which they are governed; and in attempting to define them, we are lost in obscure, though sublime imaginations concerning unknown agencies. That they may be discovered, however, there is every reason to believe. And who would not be ambitious of becoming acquainted with the most profound secrets of nature, of ascertaining her hidden operations, and of exhibiting to men that system of knowledge which relates so intimately to their own physical and moral constitution?
The future is composed merely of images of the past, connected in new arrangements by analogy, and modified by the circumstances and feelings of the moment; our hopes are founded upon our experience; and in reasoning concerning what may be accomplished, we ought not only to consider the immense field of research yet unexplored, but likewise to examine the latest operations of the human mind, and to ascertain the degree of its strength and activity.
William Lawrence. An Introduction to Comparative Anatomy and Physiology (1816)
[P 140] Having thus proceeded, as far as we can, in ascertaining the nature of life by the observation of its effects, we are naturally anxious to investigate its origin, to see how it is produced, and to inquire how it is communicated to the beings in which we find it. We endeavour therefore to observe living bodies in the moment of their formation, to watch the time, when matter may be supposed to receive the stamp of life, and the inert mass to be quickened. Hitherto, however, physiologists have not been able to catch nature in the fact. Living bodies have never been [P 141] observed otherwise than completely formed, enjoying already that vital force and producing those internal movements, the first cause of which we are desirous of knowing. However minute and feeble the parts of the embryo may be, when we are first capable of perceiving them, they then enjoy a real life, and possess the germ of all the phenomena, which that life may afterwards develop. These observations, extended to all the classes of living creatures, leads to this general fact, that there are none, which have not heretofore formed part of others similar to themselves, from which they have been detached. All have participated in the existence of other living beings, before they exercised the functions of life themselves. Thus we find that the motion proper to living bodies, or in one word, Life, has its origin in that of their parents. From these parents they have received the vital impulse; and hence it is [P 142]evident, that in the present state of things, life proceeds only from life; and there exists no other but that, which has been transmitted from one living body to another, by an uninterrupted succession.
* * * * *
[169] To make the matter more intelligible, this vital principle is compared to magnetism, to electricity, and to galvanism; or it is roundly stated to be oxygen. 'Tis like a camel, or like a whale, or like what you please. You have only to grant that the phenomena of the sciences just alluded to depend on extremely fine and invisible fluids, superadded to the matters in which they are exhibited; and to allow further that life and magnetic, galvanic and electric phenomena, correspond perfectly: the existence of a subtle matter of life will then be a very probable inference. On this illustration you will naturally remark, [P170] that the existence of the magnetic, electric and galvanic fluids, which is offered as a proof of the existence of a vital fluid, is as much a matter of doubt, as that of the vital fluid itself. It is singular also that the vital principle should be like both magnetism and electricity, when these two are not like each other.
It would have been interesting to have had this illustration prosecuted a little further. We should have been pleased to learn whether the human is more like a loadstone, a voltaic pile, or an electric machine: whether the organs are to be regarded as Leyden jars, magnetic needles, or batteries.
The truth is, there is no resemblance, no analogy between electricity and life: the two orders of phenomena are completely distinct; they are incommensurable. [P 171] Electricity illustrates life no more than life illustrates electricity. We might just as well say that an electrical machine operates by means of a vital fluid, as that the nerves and muscles of an animal perform sensation and contraction by virtue of an electric fluid. By selecting one or two minor points, to the neglect of all the important features, a distant similarity may be made out; and this is only in appearance. In the same way life might be shewn to be like any thing else whatever, or any thing else to be like life.
John Abernethy. Physiological Lectures (1817)
[P 37] First then, I am instructed, that I ought to consider life to be a property of certain structures, as gravitation and elasticity are said to be properties of matter. With this injunction, however, I cannot comply, because I can only think or consider in one way. I must deduce rational inferences from the facts belonging to any subject, or from analogies existing between that subject and others better understood. Now there is no analogy between the permanent and invariable properties of gravitation and elasticity, and the occasional and variable properties of life. Therefore, if I judge from analogy, I must think as I have hitherto [P 38] done, that life is more like electricity or magnetism, because its operations are occasional; it may vary in degree, and admits of being annulled or abstracted, without evident difference in the subject to which it had belonged. My preceptors, suddenly shifting their ground, call upon me to consider life as an effect resulting from the combined action of certain structures. I own I am not disposed to follow such leaders, yet if I do, I discover that that they wish me to consider life to be nothing; which I take to be the plain English of the Physiology contained in some late French publications relating to this subject.
When Sir Isaac Newton explained the laws of attraction, and of the motion of those substances we call matter; though he wished only to announce facts, without attempting to account for them, though reluctant to hypothesis, he afterwards felt obliged to suppose that there might be an aether forming a bond of connection between their distant masses and molecules. In the anatomical [P 39] lectures which I have had the honour of delivering in this theatre, when speaking of the ultimate fibres of the body, I observed that they varied in the properties of rigidity, pliability, strength, and elasticity; and that such properties could not be considered to be dependent on the quantity of matter contained in the fibres, which would be estimable by weight, to which such properties bear no proportionate relation; and consequently, that these properties must be attributed to certain powers of attraction and repulsion operating in various modes and degrees, between the atoms of which such fibres are composed. However minute the atoms may be which compose those visible and tangible substances we call matter, Sir Humphry Davey's experiments shew, that each atom is surrounded by electric substances possessing powers of attraction and repulsion; and which substances are not only capable of acting upon the integral parts of bodies, but also upon the largest masses of matter. These electric substances produce decomposition and recombination, and by such [P 40] means destroy the mechanical properties which had before obtained. Thus we see the toughest wood slowly decay, or suddenly consumed by fire.
Galvanism. From Giovanni Aldini, An Account of the Late Improvements in Galvanism (1803).
EXPERIMENT XXII.
The first of these decapitated criminals being conveyed to the apartment provided for my experiments, in the neighbourhood of the place of execution, the head was first subjected to the Galvanic action. For this purpose I had constructed a pile consisting of a hundred pieces of silver and zinc. Having moistened the inside of the ears with salt water, I formed an arc with two metallic wires, which, proceeding from the two ears, were applied, one to the summit and the other to the bottom of the pile. When this communication was established, I observed strong contractions in the muscles of the face, which were contorted in so irregular a manner that they exhibited the appearance of the most horrid grimaces. The action of the eye-lids was exceedingly striking, though less sensible in the human head than in that of an ox.
Percy Shelley on the Mer-de-Glace, Chamonix. From History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817).
On all sides precipitous mountains, the abodes of unrelenting frost, surround this vale: their sides are banked up with ice and snow, broken, heaped high, and exhibiting terrific chasms. The summits are sharp and naked pinnacles, whose overhanging steepness will not even permit snow to rest upon them. Lines of dazzling ice occupy here and there their perpendicular rifts, and shine through the driving vapours with inexpressible brilliance: they pierce the clouds like things not belonging to this earth. The vale itself is filled with a mass of undulating ice, and has an ascent sufficiently gradual even to the remotest abysses of these horrible desarts. It is only half a league (about two miles) in breadth, and seems much less. It exhibits an appearance as if frost had suddenly bound up the waves and whirlpools of a mighty torrent. We walked some distance upon its surface. The waves are elevated about 12 or 15 feet from the surface of the mass, which is intersected by long gaps of unfathomable depth, the ice of whose sides is more beautifully azure than the sky. In these regions every thing changes, and is in motion. This vast mass of ice has one general progress, which ceases neither day nor night; it breaks and bursts for ever: some undulations sink while others rise; it is never the same. The echo of rocks, or of the ice and snow which fall from their overhanging precipices, or roll from their aerial summits, scarcely ceases for one moment. One could think that Mont Blanc, like the god of the Stoics, was a vast animal, and that the frozen blood for ever circulated through his stony veins.
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Last updated October 9th, 2003