Almost Invincible is a remarkable fictional account of the life of Mary Shelley, arguably one of the literary world’s greatest enigmas.
“She is singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes, almost invincible.”
Halloween
- Frankenstein reborn
Halloween -
ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the
night. Whatever the early pagan or Christian origins of All Hallows' Eve, the
creatures of the netherworld are now thoroughly celebrated or lampooned,
depending on your perspective, on October 31st. These are the creatures of the
‘natural’ world, but on a stormy night in 1816, Mary Shelley conceived a
man-made monster that was to capture the imagination of generations and spawn
many 'hideous progeny'.
On All
Hallows' Eve in 1831, the Frankenstein
novel that most people read today, was reprinted and published in a one volume
popular format instead of the three volumes usual for the time, which gave it
an even wider audience. The novel had already had considerable success since it
was originally released in 1818 and almost immediately captured the popular
imagination. Its fame was boosted by stage adaptations, notably Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein,
which played at the Royal Opera House in London in 1823. Mary went to see the
production and though she admitted that they had not followed the story
closely, she thought it was well done. There were thunderstorms and a
collapsing glacier and the monster was so suitably scary that women in the
audience fainted.
It is lucky
that Mary was not precious about the representation of her work or she would
surely be endlessly rotating in her grave. The themes and imagery from the
novel have been recast into cartoons, music, plays, comedies, TV series and
almost a hundred movies. The most iconic representation was of course Boris
Karloff as the monster in the 1931 Hammer Horror movie adaption, with the
monobrow and bolts through his neck. Frankenstein's screen history started in
1910 in the first silent film from Edison studios and continues with new 2015
movie with James McAvoy and Daniel Radcliffe.
The story
has been analysed and intellectualised endlessly, but the common, horror aspect
of most incarnations has been the creation of an animated monster by human
agency, and the failure to control it thereafter. Victor Frankenstein is a
mad scientist who plays God and then refuses to take responsibility for his
creation. The vulnerabilities of the characters and the moral and social
implications of the original story are mostly marginalized. The abiding horror
is contemplating human vanity and frailty.
 |
Mary Shelley 1840
By Richard Rothwell
(Wikimedia Commons) |
Mary
Shelley was only eighteen when she started her story and it was composed on a
wild and stormy night in mid summer in Lord Byron's villa on the lake at
Geneva. That year, 1816, was known as The Year Without a Summer. Mount Tambora in Indonesia had erupted spectacularly – it
was the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history – and Europe was
blanketed in dust. People thought the end of the world had come. It was a
suitable backdrop to the creation of a gothic story as Byron, Mary and her
lover, Percy Bysshe Shelley, her stepsister Claire and Byron's doctor, Polidori,
huddled around the fire reading ghost stories. Byron then threw out the challenge
for each of the company to try their hand at the creation of something
frightening.
Mary had
felt enormous pressure to validate her genes and produce a literary work of
value, but until Frankenstein she had struggled to find the right outlet for
her creativity. So Mary's response to the challenge was inevitably more than a
simple scary story. Her parents were both radical authors; her mother wrote A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman and is considered an early feminist and
her father, William Godwin, wrote a groundbreaking anti-establishment book
called Political Justice. So writing something that had social meaning was
not surprising.
The
scientific context of Frankenstein is more unexpected but was a result of her
relationship with Shelley, the poet. When she eloped with him, Mary hadn’t
realised the depth of his passion for chemical experiments, nor the potentially
lethal impact of his obsession on working papers, tabletops or cushion covers,
as smoke rose and glasses full of foul-coloured liquid shattered. Wires and
crucibles of liquids would appear on the parlour table alongside the solar
microscope and the extremely thumbed and stained copy of The Elements of
Chemical Philosophy by Humphrey Davy. It didn't add to their acceptability
to landladies, but it did add to her inspiration for the science in
Frankenstein.
In the 1931
edition, published on October 31st 1831, Mary added a new preface where she
explained the circumstances in which the novel had been conceived. By that
time, Shelley was dead and she was largely supporting herself with her writing.
Her other novels were ‘by the Author of Frankenstein’. Frankenstein and his
monster have passed into popular culture and show no signs of diminishing
impact. Indeed with current forays into gene modification and limb replacement,
it is still, potentially, very much a modern horror story.
Suzanne Burdon
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About the Author
Suzanne Burdon is English and now lives in Sydney, Australia. She has an honours degree in Sociology with a major in Literature and a Trinity College London Licentiate in Effective Communication. She works as a social and market researcher, which involves understanding the behaviour and motivation of a wide range of people in many different contexts.
Nathen Amin grew up in the heart of Carmarthenshire and has long had an interest in Welsh history and the Welsh origins of the Tudors. This passion has guided him all over Wales to visit a wide variety of historic sites, which he has photographed and researched for this book. He has a degree in Business and Journalism and is the founder of the Henry Tudor Society. Find out more at his website nathenamin.com and follow Nathen on Facewbook and Twitter @NathenAmin.
