In Our Time - Frankenstein

Episode Date: March 19, 2020

In a programme first broadcast in May 2019, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Mary Shelley's (1797-1851) Gothic story of a Swiss natural philosopher, Victor Frankenstein, and the creature he makes from parts of cadavers and which he then abandons, horrified by his appearance, and never names. Rejected by all humans who see him, the monster takes his revenge on Frankenstein, killing those dear to him. Shelley started writing Frankenstein when she was 18, prompted by a competition she had with Byron and her husband Percy Shelley to tell a ghost story while they were rained in in the summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva.The image of Mary Shelley, above, was first exhibited in 1840.WithKaren O'Brien Professor of English Literature at the University of OxfordMichael Rossington Professor of Romantic Literature at Newcastle UniversityAnd Jane Thomas Professor of Victorian and Early 20th Century Literature at the University of HullProducer: Simon TillotsonThis programme is a repeat

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, in 1816, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley and Lord Byron had a competition to write a ghost story to pass the time on a cold, dark, wet holiday on the shores of Lake Geneva. She came up with Victor Frankenstein, a scientist,

who built a larger-than-life-human monster, only to reject his creature once it stirred and stretched his arm towards him, suddenly hideous. The monster's hopes for friendship and family are thwarted, and his revenge for that is murderous and thorough. With me to discuss Mary Shelley's Frankenstein are. Michael Rossington, Professor of Romantic Literature at Newcastle University,

Jane Thomas, Professor of Victorian and Early 20th Century Literature at the University of Hull, and Karen O'Brien, Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. Brian. Mary Shelley was only 18 when she came up with this story, but she'd already had a remarkable life. Can you tell us about that? Yes, she was born Mary Godwin in 1797 to a remarkable set of parents. Her father was William Godwin, the political philosopher, and her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, the famous feminist writer, and she had an extraordinary childhood. Her mother had died giving birth to her, but Godwin's house remained an intellectual hub in the part of London where they lived. And during her childhood, she met Wordsworth, she met She learned many languages, and she partook of the intellectual ferment of that household. And it was accentuated, the power of it, I think, because it was also part of a university in a way, a loose university of dissenting people who couldn't go to Oxford or Cambridge,

couldn't get into all sorts of establishment jobs because there were dissenters from the Anglican faith. And that boiled into her ideas. That very much boiled into her ideas, and you're quite right. So this is outside of the official church, but certainly an area where people think about ideas of politics and ideas of religion. And in many respects, Mary participated in her own father's deism. She was an avid reader, and as she says in her journal, that she started writing at a young age, an avid scribbler,

and she started writing stories very early on. Can you give us some idea of her reading? Because as I understand it, her father said, every day you must read and write something serious. Or words of that effect? She read a huge variety of political philosophies. She read novels. She was particularly interested in Gothic novels.

there had been a huge vogue for Gothic novels in the 1790s, and a lot of her reading was about catching up with that first great wave of fiction, Anne Radcliffe and Monk Lewis and a whole slew of writers. So she was genuinely eclectic in her writing, and when she did come to write Frankenstein, she described the novel as a philosophical romance, putting together those two components of her reading. She left her family with...

She eloped with Shelley when she was 16, So a lot of what you said, meeting words with colour, that happened before she was 16. And a lot of the reading you've mentioned, the reference of her, that happened before she was 16. That's right. And when she met Shelley in 1814, she fell in love with him. And she appalled her father by running away and spending some time on a walking tour on the continent with him. And it wasn't until Shelley's wife subsequently committed suicide that they were able to marry, and she was reconciled to her father. Why was her father appalled? Because Shelley was married two children. Well, he was appalled because Shelley was married with two children

and this was notwithstanding the fact that in his own writings he had written about the institution of marriage as something that in a more progressive society would no longer be necessary. So Godwin, the radical was rather fronted by Shelley's radicalism. Rather conservative on the domestic front, absolutely. And also I think at a fundamental level they had a very close bond and a very close relationship

and he felt betrayed by his daughter at that point in his life. Can we get back to God? Can we get back to Mary Walson? The Rights of Woman, and she died soon after the birth of her daughter, and that book had very unfortunate until later on, and then he took off, and is now regarded as a little keystone book in the history of women writing about their liberation. Can you just give us a bit more about that? I think it was a hugely important book for Mary,

and it was obviously a hugely important book for the radical circles in which they moved. Mary Wollstonecraft thought about a way in which society could be reformulated from within, that if political institutions could change and if people could reimagine a new form of rational society, then men and women might commune as equal beings. And many of the institutions and religious institutions that we take for granted would no longer be necessary. And I think this had a huge impact on the young Mary Godwin.

I think she thought very deeply about this kind of non-violent revolutionary idealism. And that was also very consonant with the non-violent revolutionary idealism of Godwin. And her works are very much in dialogue with that sense. sense of radical possibilities that she inherited from her parents. But she would also have known that her mother had gone to Paris to join the French Revolution and become for a while a heroin of it. She also would have known that.

She also would have known that her mother had an illicit affair with a married man and in fact her step-sister was the result of that illicit affair. So there was some modelling of behaviour going on there. Jane Thomas, how they're sitting there in 1816. It's the summer of no light because of the volcanoes over in Indonesia. and that's spread all over the world. It's dark, it's cold, and they decide to write ghost stories. Can you tell us, is it possible to tell us how she came,

why, how she came up with Frankenstein? Yeah. Well, in the 1831 edition, in the preface to it, she writes about the question that was asked of her, how, as she as a young girl, had come to imagine such an idea and dilate upon it? Who asked her that question? I suppose just general reviewers asked her this,

as a young girl, how she could have imagined this? at all. And you mentioned the summer of no light. The way she tells it is that they were, they'd gone to Europe because they were bored and distressed about, you know, being at home.

And they'd gone to join Byron and they'd had a very wet and cold summer. They were telling one another ghost stories, so they decided between them that they would each go and write a ghost story. There was a doctor though, which might be important. Polydori, who was, who was

Biron's personal physician was there. Mary seems to have grabbed hold of this idea and as a young girl she had a very vivid imagination and saw the importance of the imagination in delineating human passions or giving access to human passions that were perhaps beyond what we would normally think of. Did she herself tell us how she thought this idea had arrived? Yes. It arrives for from a kind of configuration of different things. So they're reading ghost stories to one another, or stories of the supernatural.

There are these terrific thunderstorms going on around them. And they're also having a conversation about natural philosophy, about biology, and about the origins of life. How can we pinpoint the origins of life? And electricity played a part of here. Electricity, there are these two, several competing ideas,

but the two main ones of vitalism that life develops organically and then this idea of galvanism that it's to do with kind of animal electricity. And so Mary goes to bed that night and she describes a waking dream, which is a kind of conventional way at the time of describing the imagination.

And she's not asleep. She's not dreaming this. She's imagining in this. And she imagines what it would be like for a scientist to actually give life to something, to reanimate something that was dead. and she also imagines that seminal scene of, she imagines what his reaction would be

when he actually succeeded when the idea becomes reality and it starts to move. And then she imagines the creature coming in and sort of gesticulating to Frankenstein and she imagines him twitching the bed curtains and gesturing and she said she was so terrified by that that she immediately came to consciousness and tried to kind of re-establish herself,

in the real world and she imagines the room around her and the tiles and the wallpaper and the furniture to try and anchor herself. That's terrific. Now can you very briefly tell us the core skeleton story? I will try. So, okay. So Frankenstein is the son of a wealthy merchant family. He's self-educated. He's educating himself in the sciences, natural philosophy, various other things that his father disapproves of, including the occult. He goes to university, But before he goes to university, he suffers the death of his mother, and his mother dies nursing a foundling or a cousin, depending on the addition, Elizabeth, who is going to be his wife.

Frank Stein goes to university, gets more involved in these ideas. He then decides to create this superhuman being. He animates it, it comes the life. Collect stuff, bones from graveyards. Yes, because he says that in order to work out the principle of life, you have to start with death. You have to start with decay and corrupt. and then move on from there.

Creature comes alive. Frankenstein does the responsible thing of running away, and then he rejects the creature when it comes to him. Then two or so years passed by, and Frankenstein thinks, well, the creature haven't heard from it, perhaps it's just passed away, and then his brother is murdered, and the nurse who looks after the brother is implicated.

And then the creature leers him to the frozen sea, see in Montblanc, where the creature tells him about his life, and makes Frankenstein swear to make him a female creature and says it's loneliness, it's isolation that has made me miserable. I was born good or made good. And he swears to abjure human society forever if Frankenstein will grant his witch. So Frankenstein is moved by his eloquence. He takes his best friend on a prenuptial trip.

He makes a female creature. then he realizes the horror of it and destroys the female creature in front of the monster's eyes. And then the monster pursues everybody. The Frankenstein loves and Frankenstein then pursues the monster and it ends with... And they end up... The monster then

lewers Frankenstein or the creature, perhaps we should say, Lewis Frankenstein to the frozen Arctic where he meets Robert Walton. We don't want to talk about Robert Waller. Oh, okay, right. It's difficult enough. I think we've got the story.

So the pursuer and the pursued, they're up to the North Pole and Robert Walton's there. We'll come to him in a minute. Michael Rossington. How has it published, Frankenstein? So it's published in three volumes on the 1st of January 1818, without the name of the author on the title page,

a run of 500 copies. It was published by the firm of Lackington. The manuscript had been rejected by various publishers to whom it had been offered, including Byron's publisher John Murray, but it was published then. And in terms of the way, it was received. Critics reviewed it on its first publication. The reaction was mixed.

That generally means bad. What does it mean when you say? It means that actually there were some critics like John Wilson Croker in the quarterly review who said that our taste and judgment revolt at this kind of writing. It inculcates no lesson of conduct manners or morality. And there was a strand of critical reviewing that was very hostile to the book for not having a clear moral. On the other hand, probably its most celebrated reviewer was the novelist Walter Scott in Blackwoods in March 1818. He went so far as to put forward the idea that the novel was in fact by Percy Shelley and he praised aspects of it, including its use of what he called plain and forcible English. Now, the manuscript we have of the thing is covered with notes from

Percy Shelley with whom she had eloped. And can you tell us about those notes? Yes. The surviving manuscripts we have are in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. A very interesting looking at them actually because as Mary... What does he say? So in the margins of the manuscript, which is in Mary's hand, he corrects, revises, often doing the work of an editor, really. Does he in any way change the story?

He does recommend certain changes that Mary accepts. So one example would be that at one point in the novel, Victor says that in Mary's draft, Victor's father encourages Victor to make the trip to England. Percy writes in the margin that he thinks it would be much better for the plot if Victor was in some way in charge of his own destiny and if he was the one who made the decision to go to England. Would you say he changed the novel materially?

No. In terms of percentages, roughly 4,000 words of about 72,000 words have, as it were, the mark of Percy. So I think one could say it's more a question of him acting as an editor. Thank you. Karen, Karen O'Brien, there's a quotation from Milton on the title page, which is very germane. Could you say the quotation and tell us why it's important? The quotation is from Paradise Lost. It is what Adam says to himself in agony when he realised. is that he has fallen and he's going to be expelled from the Garden of Eden. And he says aloud, did I request thee maker from my clay to mould me man? Did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?

Now that's obviously very relevant to Frankenstein because the monster did not ask Victor Frankenstein to create him and yet he finds himself cast out of the proverbial Garden of Eden. So immediately from that title page, we are asked to think about the Frankenstein story in the mythic terms of Milton's Paradise Lost, the story of the creator and the created Adam, but also the story of the creator and Lucifer, whom God also creates and who falls and becomes Satan.

And in many ways, the whole book is a mythic recapitulation, I think in secular terms of that great story. But he's also saying, the monster, let's call him, keep coming. He's also saying, it wasn't me that made me. You're responsible for all this. He's saying that to Victor Frankenstein. Exactly. I mean, it, you know, in a sense,

your parents or your creators are the lot that fate deals you in life, and you have no choice about that. And it's just an existential howling sense of injustice. How far do we take this Adam analogy, Karen? I think we should take it quite far. I think one way to look at it is through the lens of the key word in the entire novel for me, which is the word remorse. The pangs of remorse.

The pangs of remorse. Pangs? The fangs, my apologies. So, Victor, the whole of the novel feels this intense, stabilitating sense of remorse at what he has created. At the very end of the novel, we learn for the first time that the creature himself feels remorse at the murders that he's committed. And Paradise Lost is very much about that sense of Adam's remorse and Satan's lack of remorse. And remorse is the judgment that we make upon ourselves. And in the framework of

Frankenstein, everybody is self-judging. In the framework of Paradise Lost, only human beings and God himself has that capacity. So I think it's a very interesting complex. replaying of themes of guilt in what feels to me like a godless framework. And if you're going to be, Prometheus has slipped in here as well, isn't it? The man who stole fire from the gods and for that was condemned to have his liver eaten out every day. Exactly. And it's the subtitle of the novel, so it's Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus. So she's clearly alluding to the Prometheus legend and the East Gilles play, the man who stole fire from the gods.

So it is about the heroic, impossible, dangerous expropriation of knowledge. And it's worth mentioning that her husband, Shelley, was at this very time writing his play, Prometheus Unbound. Jane Thomas, a pretty obvious question, but I'm going to ask you, why does it matter that we have a man creating a person and not a woman, as is, creating a person? Can you tell us what you find significant in that? Well, the gender politics of the novel have been a subject of some critical debate.

I mean, at the centre of each of the stories, you have the patriarchal exchange of a woman between men, whichever story you look at right the way through to the creation of the female monster, which is going to be passed from Victor to the male monster, but is in fact destroyed, and I know a lot of feminist critics have made a lot about that. Can you just tell us a bit more,

why have they made a lot about it, and what have they made a lot about? Well, some critics have, I think, Anne Mella maybe, has maybe said that this is an example of male fear of sexuality, male feel of female sexuality. Because one of the things that Frankenstein ruminates about is, well, what if this woman isn't quite so biddable? What if this creature, this female creature, isn't quite so biddable? Hold on we're talking about when you later makes the female. When you makes the female creature.

I'd like to stay with the male first because we can come to the female in a few minutes. Well, so Frankenstein, so nature is feminized here, and Frankenstein talks about pursuing nature to her hiding place. And what Frankenstein has done in sort of gender terms, but I think Mary Shelley is a little bit too clever to make it just gendered, is that he's used up that feminine principle of creating life, of giving life. And the godlike principle of giving life too. so he's transgressed against the feminine principle of nature and the masculine principle of God. And there are these kind of gendered polarisations through the novel. So we see the man in terms of ego, of power, of colonisation, of ambition,

and the woman in terms of appreciation of the family, an appreciation of the surroundings, of nurturing, of looking after. But when the creature is created, he's a tabulararza. So he's a blank sheet. So he's not born male. He's not born with those masculinist instincts. He's born, in fact, we might say, with more feminine instincts. He wants to look after the Lacey family.

He wants to be good. He saves the drowning child. But he says it's society that makes him bad. It's the reactions that he receives from others that actually makes him evil. And then at the very end, you have, as Karen has referred to, this outburst of remorse from the creature who was driven Frankenstein to.

the pitch of premature death. I mean, Frankicized only in his 20s when he dies. And then suddenly he's full of remorse. He says, but he was my father. He was my creator and I have destroyed him. So I think she's playing a lot with these gendered ideas of masculinous behavior and feminist behavior or feminine behavior. But one thing that comes out is the terrific arguments that the creature has. He says, you made me, I wanted to be good. What you've done is, by abandoning me and leaving me and giving me no help, he's made me turn to being bad in order to survive. And he's got good arguments.

And Victor Frankenstein realizes these are good arguments and are softened by them. So that's it. Can you develop that? Yes. Well, I think a loss of that, absolutely, as you say, comes from this sense that I was benevolent and good. Misery made me a fiend. I think that comes actually from

the influence of Rousseau. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who famously in his discourse on the origins and foundations of inequality among men, talks about the idea of the noble savage. Actually, it's societies and civilizations that corrupt human beings. Man is born free.

Exactly. Man is born free, but everywhere finds himself in chains. And a really strong sense that Mary Shelley is kind of mining this Rousseauian context. And we see that also, in the fact that, as we know, Russo exiled, was exiled from Geneva, his home city. We see in the novel that Geneva is an extremely problematical place

where justice is miscarried in the case of Justine Moritz. Justine Moritz is the... ...is the nurse of William, the brother of Victor, whose murders. and also a sense, I think, that at the moment when the creature's opening up to Frankenstein, telling him his story, very interesting to think about where they are, they're on the mountainside, a hostile environment for humankind. But actually, the creature says the bleak skies are, for me, kinder than your fellow beings. You know, actually his environment, his home is in nature because, that's where he feels as though he's kind of understood. Whenever he's presented himself to human beings,

sometimes to those who think he's hideous, they're frightened, they want to get away from him. Exactly. And they do get away from him and leave him alone yet again. Yes, exactly. And that whole sense that actually it's, it is the human that is always threatening and always being aggressive towards the creature

and causing him this sense of misery in isolation and loneliness that I think comes out of that Russoian tradition. So Karen, Karen, I by the, we could look at it as a potentially good creature whom contact with the world turns into a wicked creature.

We could look at it in those terms, but we could also understand that there's something innately capable of intense and extreme violence and there's nothing more palpable when you've read the novel of that that's feeling of the imprint of the monster's fingers on people's necks.

That's how he kills people. and that's what Victor starts to feel towards the end. So I think it's ambivalent, but I think what it's trying to do as a novel is construct a very potent sense of what we exclude from the circle of social sympathy. And in excluding those kind of things, and we could allegorize that in all kinds of ways, that thing becomes far worse and far more dangerous to us

than it need otherwise have been. So I don't think it's straightforwardly about the exclusion of a benevolent being creates a monster. Monsters are made, and they're also, so born and there's a real ambivalence in the novel about where the monster, the creature, the fiend, stands in relation to that paradigm. And like

the argument themselves, you flip from one side to the other, from one side to the other and back again. What part does isolation play in all this kind? I think it plays a fundamental part. I think this book is a profound meditation on isolation. There's the isolation of Victor with the terrible secret that he can't share. The secret of having made this...

Because he tells nobody until very late in the novel that he's made this creature and this is why people are dying and this is why people are wrongfully executed for murder. But then there's the palpable isolation of the creature who says, I am like Adam, but I'm Adam without an Eve. You know, I really, if I had a creature of my own species, and he does use that word species, as though he is of a different species,

I would be in a different place. And it's so intense. And what for me is quite interesting is the way that that's to be contrasted with what we would understand as a more romantic notion of solitude, which is being alone and beautiful scenery. That is very wordsworthy and that's very positively positioned in the novel. There are wonderful descriptions of the alpine scenery,

the scenery in Scotland. And being alone is not isolation. It's actually fulfilling in the novel. This is a different kind of exclusion and outcast status that the monster suffers. And she takes that through in all sorts of ways. She comes back to that the whole time. It is the isolation you can't bear.

And therefore he says, make me a female. That's right. Who can be my companion? Then I will bother no. and the two of us will live together happily. And that's partly because he has witnessed a happy family, the Delacey family. He has a very domestic idea of what sympathy means. They're like a wordsworthy family, aren't there?

They're a little family that live in exile in the mountains, and he doesn't declare himself to them, but he observes them from a little hovel nearby, and he sees what social happiness might look like. The blind father. The blind father. But as soon as he declares himself to them, they immediately see this monster and they're horrified.

The children do. He gets on very well with it. the father before they turn up. He gets on very well with the father because the father is blind. That's right. And that's, you know, that's a really pathetic incident in the novel and to be seen and is to be known for the monster and it's to be

rejected. So the build-up is interesting because he is seeing good people, being good to each other and playing music and through them by complete implausibility. It's riddled with implausibility he learns the language, he learns enough to read Paradise Lost and so on which he finds in the woods and stuff. But he learns

the kindness of this is this domesticity and companionship completely entraps him. And then when he faced, when they, except for the father, when he faces it, they hate him and beat him. Absolutely. That's exactly right. He learns the whole history of mankind from primal feelings to language to the history of society to its culmination in enlightened domesticity. And he wants part of that. And this novel idealises that kind of domesticity in many ways, but he can't have it. What he finds is that he's in a completely different regime and one, you know, from which he will be punished and excluded.

Can we though likely, do I touch on these implausibilities? He learns English language through one eye through a peephole, watching the people talk, and then he finds in the woods Paradise Lost, and Young Verta, and he reads that, and we're effortlessly into Plutarch's lives, is it? Yeah, the lives of the, and so on and so when we go. So the poor implausibility is the whole way through,

from a construction of a monster from, Stoppy digs up in graveyards, but it doesn't matter. No. Why not? Why doesn't it matter? Well, it's coleridge's idea of the willing suspension of disbelief, isn't it? Because once you've accepted that Frankenstein animates, how was he, eight-foot-tall corpse from bits of dead bodies, once you've accepted that, then you can't really quibble about anything else that happens in the novel, because it becomes like a kind of fable, doesn't it, to illustrate all the things that Karen has been saying.

So you have to accept that. Once you've taken that one leap, you have to accept the rest of it that comes with it. You do. I mean, you do. And there's interesting. bits where you mentioned the point, I think, where the only point where Frankenstein actually admits to having created the creature is to a magistrate, because he's locked up because they think he's murdered, Clairval, his best friend. In fact, it's the creature who's done it.

And the magistrate said, well, tell me how you did it. And he said, I can't possibly tell you how he did it. I can't possibly let this secret out, because once the secret is out, then other people will try. And this is the reason the creature gives for, if we believe him, this idea that he's going to immolate himself on his own funeral pie. He said, I don't want any evidence of how I was put together left for other people to use. There are so many strands of this book. I'm sorry, interrupted you.

Is the thought of the power of science? All of a sudden the lightning in the sky was electricity, which could make people. Science was suddenly not only, it was a new, more powerful, as powerful, powerful as any religion. It was the power of signs. The God was signs now. Or nature. Well, I suppose in a sense what Mary Shelley is getting at is the egotism of the scientist. This idea

is the kind of post-enlightenment notion that anything, even God, could be rationalised through an application of the human brain and what she's saying is, well, no, perhaps, you know, there are some things that we shouldn't apply the human brain too.

I mean, we've heard some of the language of this novel. I mean, it's absolutely amazing where Frankenstein talks about pursuing nature to her grave and dabbling with unhallowed fingers into the secrets of the human frame. I mean, they're fantastic. And this is Mary Shelley's language, isn't it, that's coming out of here. Shelley's tends to be a little bit more flowery, I think. But this kind of...

But it's also the idea of scientific responsibility. This idea that you can't undo what you have discovered. you know, it's like nuclear fission. You can't unlearn what you've actually discovered. So therefore you have to apply it responsibly, which I think is, again, one of the really important elements in the novel. There's a framing device, Michael Rossington, to this story. Letters from a man who's got himself locked in ice in the North Pole, Robert Walton.

Can you, the explorer of all, why is that important? I think it's important because actually through, Robert Walton, I think we as readers, have some way of understanding how Victor has come to be the person that he is. We learn from Walton's listening to Victor's story. So Victor Bankside lands up on Walton's ship when he is in pursuit of the creature. That's right. Walton's ship is locked in ice, can't move. And he's endangering his men. and he's going slightly mad with his own obsession. Yes, and actually maybe the fact that right at the end of the novel,

Walton does decide actually to, on the melting of the ice, he decides to steer the ship back, not to pursue the journey any further. In other words, he agrees with his crew that it's too dangerous. Trying to find the northwest passage. Exactly, trying to find the northwest passage. And that is a way, perhaps, of the novel teaching, us as readers, that this kind of unbridled ambition, this obsession with the pursuit of knowledge

that Victor has, is perilous and potentially extremely dangerous. But also there's one other thing about the framing device of the letters, which I think is significant. Robert Walton's letters are to his sister. His sister has the initials MWS, Margaret Walton, Saville, which correspond to the initials of Mary Shelley after she married Shelley in December 1816. It is therefore arguable that Mary Alton Saville, who's the recipient of Walton's letters, but also the Victor's story and the creature's story within Victor's story, is to some extent holding the whole thing together. Mary Shelley writes herself in to the novel in this rather oblique way. Also, it's exactly more or less nine months between the first of Walton's letters,

which is penned in December and the last one in September. And again, lots of scholars have suggested that Mary Shelley might even be trying to write into the novel her own period of gestation the period when she was in Austencraft's womb. How far do you do you like to them dissect? I hope you don't murder it dissect. Right. I come in a minute and Jane. Go to Karen here.

Shelley's first audiences, did they find her science plausible, which of course we don't, but did they find it plausible enough to think this could happen? As Mike was explaining, the early reviews didn't really focus on the science aspect of the novel quite so much. It's an interesting blend in any case of occult science and contemporary chemistry and electrical experiments. I think the scientific dimension really came to the fall when Frankenstein, was adapted as a stage play in 1823 by a writer called Richard Brinsley Peak in a play called Presumption. And it's really in that play that you have on stage, Victor Frankenstein, his trusty assistant, and the idea of something that is all about caldrons and things being created off stage.

And then a further adaptation three years later really puts the laboratory equipment actually on the stage for the first time. So I think it's really the dramatic adaptations, and there were very, very many, of them, starting in the 1820s. First of all, they made Mary Shelley famous, she says, lo and behold, I found myself famous, she said, when she went to that play in 1823 with her father. But secondly, I think they distilled a broader set of themes about Promethean knowledge into something that is much more

about the trappings and failings and dangers of modern science. Jane, you wanted to say something. I was just going to say that she actually, in the 1831 edition, refers to the novel as her hideous progeny, just picking up on what Mike. Mike's just said. But also there's that sense that she's kind of pursued by the novel throughout her life, just like the creature is pursued by Frankenstein, and Frankenstein's pursued by the creature. She can't ever quite get free of this thing, this amazing,

marvellous thing that she's loosed upon the world. The pursue becomes the pursued. The creature pursues Frankenstein and pursues the creature to kill him to end all this. And in that sense, they're sort of two sides. Are they two sides of the same corner? Yeah. Yeah, well, the creature leads Frankenstein. Interesting, the creature is vegetarian, which I've picked up. He said, I don't kill animals. I eat, you know, vegetables and fruit and nuts. And he leaves little meals for Frankenstein to lead him to where they're going to have this second final confrontation, again, symbolically in the Sea of Ice. But you were going to talk, you were talking about the two sides of the same. There's a lot of twinning going on. Walton's looking for a best

friend, which he finds in Frankestine, somebody who shares his sensibility. and Frankestine, of course, finds his best friend in Clerval. But Frankstine never... Clerval is a powerful university. Yes, that's right. Frankinstein never gives the creature a name. And that has led to a lot of confusion. People, I can remember as a kid seeing a comic strip with Frank N. Stein,

as if the name of the monster is the name of the creator. He names it. He names it vile wretch, vile monster, vampire. He kind of gives it those to... In fact, Walton is the only one who calls it a being, I think. You were talking about it being a different species. Pre-Froid, there is this theory that perhaps Frankenstein's creature is his doppelganger. So Frankenstein pursues his egotistical ambition, just like Walton does.

He distances himself from the feminine sphere of the family. And so what the creature does is kind of make that come true for him by gradually destroying all of the members of his family. So you've just got these three men, well, these two men, Walton and Frankenstein, who were also twin. They're kind of naked egos meeting with the creature in the ice or on the sea of ice. So it's interesting in a pre-Froidian way to look at that doppelganger. It seems to be infinitely analysable, doesn't it? It is.

Michael Rossington. Why did she reread Frankenstein twice? What did she change? So many of the changes she's made. makes are stylistic. She says very soon after it's published that she wants to make changes. She thinks that actually some of the language of the first edition is a bit underdeveloped. So there's a lot of stylistic change, but there are also some changes to the plot. And just to give you one example, whereas in the first edition of 1818, Victor and Elizabeth are cousins.

in the 1831 edition it's made very, very clear that there's no possible suspicion of any kind of incestuous relationship here, Elizabeth's from another family, an unrelated family. It's a slight sense that in 1831, she's perhaps toning down

some of the more raw kind of elements of that first edition. Why would you do that? I think partly, because she's a more experienced writer. She's published. Is it more experienced to turn things down? Perhaps she's got more of a sense of what her audience is in 1831. She's aware that she's on, she's actually needs to make a livelihood out of her writing. To some extent, the audience that she's writing for in the 1830s is a different audience from the one of the late 1810s. Karen, would you like to take that up? I think it's also worth adding, however, that she writes a stunningly brilliant preface to that 1831 edition.

There's a very short preface to the first edition written by her husband as though the author were a male and that goes on a lot about the domestic affections and the deep emotions and sidesteps, the genesis of the story, and the 1831 preface brings out magnificently that nightmare that she has, the genesis of the story. And the real emphasis, going back to that Gothic tradition on terror and horror and the thrill of being terrified and the need to terrify audiences. And she says, this dream terrified me, this idea terrified me so much. I hope it will terrify the readers.

So she does take it back in a way to the thrill of the novel and the thrilling way in which she gets Frankenstein to narrate it. And I think that's a repositioning that's quite helpful. And ideas around in many places that are beauty in the lap of horror, the sublime and they're terrible, merging into each other or set against each other. Yes, I think there is, however, a distinction between horror, which is the thing that makes you kind of recoil on yourself and is tinged with an emotion of disgust and the thrill of terror as well.

And both of those things are beautifully worked into the way that she has suspense in the story. For me, the most terrifying aspect of the story is that Victor hears from the monster, the threatening phrase, I will be with you on your wedding night. He thinks that means the creature's going to murder him. And we have to be quite alert readers to spot that story. not what the creature intends. And we have this self-conversing internal voice of Victor narrating his thoughts

as he prepares for his own death on his wedding night. With pistols in his pocket. And then, of course, Elizabeth goes into a separate room. He hears the scream and she is the one who is murdered. Yes, on her wedding night. On her wedding night. Can I ask you then, Joan,

what effect did Frankenstein have on subsequent writers and subsequent stage? We've heard a little bit about stage shows. And then, of course, later films, Well, it is the quintessential novel of doubleness in a pre-Froidian age. It was, yeah, re-edited. I mean, it's never been out of print, as far as I'm aware. It was reissued in 1831.

And I think it comes to the Victorian imagination, particularly because of the Franklin expedition, which we haven't mentioned, which was this terribly tragic expedition to the North Pole, to find the Northwest Passage, in which all 128 men were lost. But, okay, we can start with, well, Dickens. Think about Pip and Orlik in great expectations. Orlik does what Pitt would like to do, which is murder Mrs. Joe for him. Think about that scene in Jane Eyre where Bertha Mason lifts the curtain on Jane Eyre the night before her wedding and gestures to her.

I think that's straight from Frankenstein. But the most important one, I think, is Dr. Shackle and Mr. Hyde, and Stevenson was deeply influenced by Frankenstein. And again, you have that same image there, but also the picture of Dorian Gray. And I think we have to add Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff is the excluded other, who becomes monstrous by virtue of his exclusion. And then we roll into the film after film after film.

We roll into the 1910 silent film, still very well worth seeing, watching the creature come out of the quadrant with lots of bubbles and strange shapes. And then the wonderful films in the 1930s by Whale, Frankenstein and then in 1935 the bride of Frankenstein with the stunning performance by Boris Karloff as a monster that you can both pity and dread. Boris Karloff became the monster, didn't do. He absolutely did. Also I think Blade Runner, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner,

there's lots of references to Frankenstein in Blade Runner where the main replicant goes back to the factory and to his maker and again rehearses that whole discussion. Michael, do you see the legacy still sustained today? I do. I think it's because the legacy sustained because this is a novel about what it is to be human. It's almost offering a perspective from the creature's vantage point of what human beings are like. And actually, it's full of all the extremes of rage, pain, fear, but also sympathy, love, lots of other positive qualities as well. Well, thank you very much. Thank you very much, Michael Rossington, Jane Thomas, Karen O'Brien. Next week, kinetic theory, why the pressure increases when volume decreases and why Newton was wrong.

Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. You can elaborate on why you find it implausible. Oh, it's implausible, never the bloominable. It's implausible and yet it's additionally under-explained, isn't it, in a lot of ways? Yeah, but I mean, you have to acknowledge. No, the fact that it's impossible to do what he did. Victor Frankenstein, it's impossible to create a creature the way he created a creature.

So that's totally implausible that he could do it in the first place. And that's a big implausibility. It's implausibility everything about the creatures. It doesn't stop me thinking it's a wonderful book and he's a wonderful creation. It's implausible that after studying this family who can speak very nice domestic platitude to each other, he can read Milton and all the rest. That's a bit implausible. it's implausible

he more or less swims across the Atlantic and not as an English implausible after implausibility after implausibility actually so that becomes his character he is the implausible character who is convincing

and we can hold those two things at the same time I don't know if that answer your question it does but it's also why on earth does Victor create this monster and then just run away because he didn't know

what was going to happen take no responsibility whatsoever maybe God was like that maybe he created and maybe people think God just created He didn't know what was going to happen. Maybe he ran away. Maybe that's for the song of the universe.

It's a difference between the idea and the reality, isn't it? I mean, you can imagine these things, but when they actually happen, that can be terrifying. I mean, we're talking about that sublime mixture of beauty and terror. Frank Einstein says very clearly he selected all the elements of his novel, of his CERT novel, of his creature to be beautiful. And then he says, beautiful great God. When he sees it all together, it's absolutely monstrous.

But what I wanted to talk about, You cut me off about the frame narrative because what I wanted to talk about is the reason why it grips your imagination is there are three unresolved questions at the end of the novel. Does the creature actually go and kill itself? Do we believe he's going to do that?

And there are slight differences in the ending that make that plausible. Does Walton ever get back to England? We never know. Does he ever get back there? I kind of expected he would. Did you? I think they were steering south.

No, I think he was steering south towards her. That's the idea that he does get back. I don't think he has to say, and I met my sister. Yeah. It's not resolved, though. I know it's not resolved with a big thumping full stop, but that's my view anyway. It doesn't actually resolve with the sentence you want, no.

And then the other thing is, is it all just, you were talking about Walton being driven mad? I think you mentioned Walton being driven mad by being frozen in the ice. Could this all be an elaboration, just a big fiction that's happening inside Walton's head? There's no independent, verifiable existence that this happened. Is this just a, you know, a terrible breakdown that's caused by his imprisonment? I think that I would rather have the author writing it than her allowing Walton to write.

But this is why the frame narratives are so interesting, aren't they? Because, you know, it's like a Russian dog. I didn't find the framework as interesting as you do. I mean, I didn't. So, I mean, it's like. Yeah. You prefer it was a dark and dreary. I prefer it. I'm glad it's there, but I don't find it. It isn't to think that interests me as much as the rest.

And it probably wasn't there in the first. The first manuscript is lost, but there's reason to believe it wasn't there. Wasn't there in the first. She got straight on with it. Yes. One of the things I am fascinated about with this novel is it's so carefully crafted in many ways with regards to matters of time, you know, the dating of everything. and thinking of, say, the reading material, because Felix reads Seifes, Volney's ruins of empires, which is published in the early 1790s. But actually, the novel is completely anachronistic when it comes to poetry. We have quotations from Coler's Ancient Mariner,

from Wazvus Tintan Abbey, all of which post-date the chronological framework of the novel. We have quotations from Shelley's poets. 1816 mutability, a quote from Byron's Child Harold about the palaces of nature, as if in some way the imagination is enormously powerful and has its own prerogative. You know, the imagination perhaps can override any other attempts in the novel to make things accurate, either historically or scientifically. and that interests me.

The Ancient Mariner is quoted in that all-important chapter 5. Fantastic quotation for the ancient mariner. And I do think that's a very key poem for this novel. There's that idea of loneliness and isolation. All alone. Walton's saying, I shall kill no albatross. He actually says that. I think it's a really foundational poem for this novel.

And Walton's a kind of wedding guest, isn't he, in Victor? Yes, I don't know. is a mariner. But what do you make at the end, where Frankenstein has told him this story and said, learn from me, learn from what I'm telling you not to make the same mistake.

And then Walton's men mutiny because they fear that Walton's going to carry on once the ice is broken and go further north. And Walton, and Frankenstein hears these men mutiny. And he goes and tells them off, and says, what's the matter with you? Where's your ambition? You know, why do you not want to pursue your goal,

you're cowards. But in the end, Walton decides, as you say, that he will go back. And he says to his sister, I feel like a bit of a coward. I feel like I've not kind of seen this through. But I am going to go back.

And I've always found that a bit kind of strange that Frankenstein said he goes back on himself after telling this huge story, you know, about being responsible to other people. And then he castigates them for being cowards. I think that her indifference of contradictions is all the things that is intriguing. I agree. I agree, actually. And in relation to that, the fact that he can't control himself in some way.

Frankenstein, in some way, it's partly about not being able to control yourself. There's one dimension of the novel that a lot of people think about that we didn't touch on very fully, which is the extent to which this is a political novel. It's very rooted in her father's utterly wonderful novel, Caleb Williams, which is a pursuer and a pursuit story about an aristocrat who unjustly hounds his tenant and it ends in mutually assured destruction between the Kalin Williams. And that's a very political novel about the injustice of the old regime and the way that the old regime political system corrupts people. This is a novel undoubtedly with an old regime political setting.

It's definitely set in the 1700s. And there are ways, given the extent to which, During the French revolutionary period, both the revolutionaries and the anti-revolutionists talked about the opposition in terms of monstrosity and monsters. There are ways of reading this as the revolutionary other or the Aungian regime, other, or however you want to read it. And it was certainly referenced in Parliament in the 19th century in terms of slave emancipation, slave rebellion. So is the monster that unassimitable force outside of the political mainstream that threatens to overturn? the whole order and actually has some legitimate claim to overturn it. And I don't know what I think about that,

because in some ways it interests me that she stepped away from the overt politics of her parents, but it is possible to put the politics back into the novel. One thing that's intriguing is how many ideas it throws up inside the book and how many ideas of the time and reaching forward across the board. I mean, that massive education that she got before 16 by her father must have penetrated her in an extraordinary creative way. And the creature itself is a kind of symbol of the democratic

because it's made up from criminals, from the poor, from the body parts that have been dug up from it. That's another implausibility of it. Yeah, we have to swallow that. Yeah, we do. But they were doing experiments with galvanism. They were taking corpses down that were freshly hanged and applying electricity to them

and there was this kind of reaction which was terrifying. But they didn't think up the odd bone from graveyards that's a different thing. Taking a fresh corpse down, putting it down, shoving some electricity through them you would get the odd twitches wouldn't you?

Just like fingernails keep growing. But that's different from putting bits of bodies together. Yeah, yeah. But I say you have to willingly suspend your disbelief if you're going to... Oh, I'm off of spending disbelief, right? I'm also saying, I'm all for saying at the same time, it's implausible.

It's like, it makes it richer for me. that it's implausible. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's much more psychological, isn't it, than the previous Gothic novels, that it's not so dependent on plot. Yes, in that way, I think. It's quest narratives.

It's a very psychological novel as well. Oh, yes, yeah. Another thing that struck me, and I don't think any contemporary review, I think contemporary views, if that just popped up, would give it a very hard time. One of the things is the incessant repetition

about how grim he feels, how terrible it is, how awful he feels. He's got bigger burden than anybody in the world. Then five pages on how grim he feels. How awful is this. The other 10 pages, how grim it is. It's true, isn't it?

He does go on and on and on, doesn't it? Now, an editor, I can see. Many in an editor now, I just say, oh, too much. Cross-scots are up. But something in the repetition helps to drive it. What do you think? Yeah. I think at its best, and this is where Shelley's edits

were maybe not ideal, there's a kind of stylistic plainness that she definitely gets from Coleridge the ancient mariner you know just those those very plain sentences and plain words that are just very chilling and resonant and there's repetition

I mean it is absolutely true that the word remorse is the most repeated word and it does kind of build up a kind of orchestral sound in your head after a while to look at it another way the way that I don't think it that way You were talking about the way that your sympathies change

depending on who's telling the story. So you hear Frankenstein's view of his monstrous creation. And then you hear the creature talk, and your sympathies change. I think she writes very sympathetically about the creature at one stage. So then another thing about why we might get them confused is that it is a disquisition, as you say, on human nature, but also on the nature of monstrosity.

You know, how do we pinpoint monstrous or monstrosity? Is it how you look or is it how you behave? We forgot to mention that this young, that this girl had already lost a child in Innocentine. We did. In fact, she lost, I believe, two, am I correct about that? That she lost, William, her son died after Frankenstein was published, but she lost a son and a daughter.

She lost, her first child is born and dies in March 1815. and then the next death is Clara September 1818 so slightly after the application date Frankenstein and then William dies in June 1819 she gives birth to Percy Florence who's the only surviving child in November 1819 and she has a miscarriage just before Percy Shelley's death in June 1822 she talks about a dream isn't she? She says she has a dream that her little baby came to life and they tried to rub it warm in front of the fire, which may well feed into the inception of the story.

She claims it as in the 1831 preface, isn't she mentions it? I'll have a bit of tea, please. It's a good, thank you. Thank you. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Ever thought about the music you wouldn't want to be without? As host of Desert Island Discs, every week I ask my guest to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury that they'd want with them if they were stranded alone on a Desert Island. This week I'm casting away Louis Theroux. Listen in, not only to find out what music he's chosen and it is fabulous, but also to learn why he impressed Michael Moore,

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