200

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus was first published on January 1, 1818.

200 years ago.

On, now, to Frankenstein’s third century!

Repost The Villa Diodati

In 1816, Lord Byron rented the manor known as the Villa Diodati, near Cologny, on Lake Geneva. The house already had solid literary credentials. Its original owner, Giovanni Diodati, had translated the Bible into Italian and French, and the poet John Milton (whom Mary would quote in Frankenstein) is said to have vacationed there in 1639.

Byron was joined that fateful summer by his personal physician, John Polidori, and his guests: Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin (soon to be Shelley), and Claire Claremont. It was here that ghosts stories were read aloud, and at the nearby guesthouse where she resided that Mary conceived of Frankenstein and first wrote these words that, slightly edited, would open chapter five of the book: “It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld my man completed…”

The villa still stands. It is the square building, right of center, in the GoogleEarth image below.

http://www.english.upenn.edu/Projects/knarf/Places/diodati.html

http://www.rc.umd.edu/reference/misc/shelleysites/tours/tour1816.html

RepostMary Shelley, a Tell-Tale Moon, and the creation of Frankenstein

An article in the November 2011 issue of Sky & Telescope reveals the precise moment, down to date and hour, when Mary Shelley conceived of Frankenstein.

In her introduction to the 1831 edition of the novel, Mary described a dream in which she saw “the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together”, and how “the hideous phantasm of a man” came alive “on the working of some powerful engine”. Brought awake by the startling vision, Mary wrote, “I see them still; the very room, the dark parquet, the closed shutters, with the moonlight struggling through, and the sense I had that the glassy lake and white high Alps were beyond.

Now, the moment of revelation has been pinpointed.

Dr. Don Olson, an astrophysicist at Texas State University-San Marcos, practices the unconventional science of “forensic astronomy”. Working with fellow scientists and students, matching the tantalizing clues found in text, archives and maps with the irrefutable logic of star charts, tide schedules and field expeditions, Dr. Olson has solved historical puzzles, revealing new information, new layers of meaning and a new appreciation for famous moments in history and art.

Among other discoveries, Olson and his team have re-dated Caesar’s invasion of Britain in 55 BC; explained how a rare low tide doomed the Marines at Tarawa Beach in 1943, and how a rising moon led to the tragic sinking of the USS Indianapolis in 1945. In significant contributions to art history, Olson has pinpointed the exact locations and the precise moments captured in paintings by such artists as William Blake, Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch, notably identifying the tortured sky in Munch’s The Scream as the planet-spanning effect of the Krakatoa eruption. Olson can even tell the exact instant when Ansel Adams clicked the shutter on his most famous photograph.

In literature, Olson has studied Chaucer, Whitman and identified Hamlet’s star as a supernova. Now, turning to Mary Shelley, Olsen and his collaborators have settled the issue of when, exactly, Frankenstein was conceived.

The clue lay in Mary’s description of moonlight “struggling” through closed shutters at Maison Chapuis, the small house she and her lover Percy occupied near Byron's Villa Diodati. Based on lunar cycles and confirming results on a field trip to Cologny, Switzerland, Olson was able to determine which of two recorded dates for Mary’s inspiration was the correct one. On June 22, 1816, a waning moon rode too low to illuminate Mary’s second-story bedroom, but the other documented date, June 16, proved just right as a gibbous moon rose high and bright enough to be noticed by the awakened Mary. Working out the angles, Olson is also able to attest that the moon shone into Mary’s bedroom at 2 AM.

As morning came, Mary writes, “I announced that I had thought of a story. I began that day with the words, ‘It was on a dreary night of November,’ making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream.”

Thus confirmed, Mary Shelley began Frankenstein on June 16, 1816. The moon tells us so.

Sky & Telescope magazine, and a digital preview of the November 2011 issue.

Don Olson’s website at Texas State University.

Strange As it Seems!

Mary Shelley’s own story of having first imagined Frankenstein as a waking dream became a pop culture anecdote, endlessly repeated. Here, in a cartoon panel from March 1950, a generic Mary tosses around in a Forties hairdo and negligee, dreaming up the plot “for the amusement of friends”.

Created by writer and artist John Hix, the Strange as It Seems newspaper feature launched in 1928 to immediate success and a syndicated career that would span 42 years. The strip’s popularity triggered a series of movie shorts from Universal and Columbia, eventually packaged for television, and a long-running radio series with episodes reissued on records. The features were recycled in book collections and comic books.  

Obviously inspired by Robert Ripley’s Believe It or Not, Hix quickly staked out his own territory, favoring mild curiosities and oddball facts while Ripley’s strip skewed sensationalistic and downright weird. The difference in tone would serve Hix when, in 1935, the Pacific International Exposition in San Diego invited him to replace Ripley’s exhibit of '34, judged “too gruesome”. Again, in ’39, the New York World’s Fair picked Hix over Ripley for its exhibition of curiosities. Ripley countered by setting up his Odditorium on land just outside the Fair’s jurisdiction.

John Hix succumbed to a heart attack on D-Day — dare I say "strange as it seems" —, June 6, 1944, a few days short of his 37th birthday. Through the coming years, the strip would be passed on to a long line of family members. John’s brother, Ernest, picked up as researcher and writer, relying on artists Dick Kirby and Doug Heyes, and ran the feature until his own sudden demise, in a 1948 plane crash. Ernest’s wife, Elsie Huber Hix, continued on with artist George Jahns until she retired in 1963. Her son, Ernest Jr. and his wife Phyllis ran the strip with art by Jahns until the feature folded in 1972. John Hix’s grandnephew, Jeff, is currently curator of the Hix archives.

The Mary Shelley panel was from Elsie’s tenure, with perfunctory art by Jahns. The ‘waking dream’ anecdote had first been used by John Hix back in 1936, on radio episode #195, as “How ‘Frankenstein’ was inspired by a nightmare”.

A detailed history of Hix’s Strange as It Seems, on Digital Deli.

A 1937 Strange as It Seems short from Columbia about Revolutionary War hero, the Marquis de Lafayette.

A video history of John Hix on the Strange as It Seems YouTube channel, run by Jeff Hix. 

Mary Shelley Celebrated

We mark the birthday, this weekend, of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, née Mary Godwin on 30 August, 1797. On this occasion, we also note the recent announcement of two new films devoted to Mary Shelley, both starring young, high profile actresses and both under the guidance of women directors.

MARY SHELLEY’S MONSTER will star Sophie Turner of GAME OF THRONES in a film described as “a story of youth that transcends time, a gothic romance, a love triangle that involves a dark passenger…” The attached director, Coky Giedroyc, is familiar with the period and the subject, having directed a TV movie of WUTHERING HEIGHTS (2009), and two excellent episodes of the Frankenstein-related PENNY DREADFUL series for Showtime.

A STORM IN THE STARS casts Elle Fanning, recently of MALEFICENT (2014) as Mary and tells of her forbidden romance with poet Percy Shelley. The film has been entrusted to Saudi-Arabian director Haifaa Al-Mansour.

We’ll keep an eye out and report on developments on these projects over the months to come.

Sources: Deadline Hollywood and The Independent.

The Shelley-Godwin Archive

Now THIS is what the web was created for! I’m not kidding. Recently, on Halloween last, the existing manuscript of Frankenstein was made freely available online. That’s all of Mary Shelley’s original notebooks, the drafts and copies in her own hand. Every page up for scrutiny, accompanied by corresponding transcription, and you can toggle to highlight Mary’s handwriting or Percy Shelley’s annotations and editing. Until two months ago, consulting these materials would have required extensive travel in England and the United States and very privileged access to scattered institutions. Now, these original documents are accessible for study on your personal computer or tablet.

This remarkable initiative required generous funding — in large part by America’s National Endowment for the Humanities — and the concerted efforts of several institutions, notably Oxford’s Bodleian Library and the New York Public Library. The project’s impressive Advisory Board and tech experts include the contribution of the ever-eminent Charles E. Robinson, author of The Frankenstein Notebooks, who provides an invaluable introduction and a Frankenstein chronology.

Frankenstein is only the first offering in a proposed web-based archive of the entire works of “England’s First Family of Writers”, namely Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary’s parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and John Goodwin.

It speaks to the enduring importance of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that it should be the first work of the Shelley-Godwin Archives to be published online. The study of Frankenstein has taken an astonishing leap forward.

The Shelley-Godwin Archive.

Mary Shelley, by Fernando Vicente

A Mary Shelley in caricature, with movie monster flattop, neck bolts and Bride hairstreaks. Shelley’s sad-eyed likeness comes from Richard Rothwell’s painting of 1840.

Spanish artist Fernando Vicente is perhaps best known for his harrowing Vanitas series of portraits superimposing anatomical detail onto glamorous models, the women quite literally exposing their inner selves. Another series of images combines portraits and mechanical drawings, substituting gears and machinery for body parts. Any of the flayed images and the mechanical reconfiguration could serve as Frankenstein illustrations.

The Mary Shelley portrait is just one of many remarkable caricatures by Vicente. Follow the links to see more of the artist’s amazing work.

Fernando Vicente’s website, and a blog, featuring an immense selection of caricatures.

Fernando Vicente’s Anatomical Art, on Trendland. 

Frankenstein Abridged

As if conjured, The Monster rises like a supernatural apparition in this unsigned illustration of the creation scene from Frankenstein published in The New York Press of January 16, 1910.

There was a time when newspapers routinely published fiction. It is generally held that the runaway success of Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Paper, serialized in 1836, inspired publishers to syndicate popular novels in daily installments. The practice declined through the mid-1900s with serialized novels moving to periodicals and pulp magazines, though some papers continued running book serials well into the Sixties.

Frankenstein was running in newspapers by the late 1800s, but the curious version at hand is not a serial but rather an abridged story, formatted for a single broadsheet page, part of a series called “A Classic in a Page”. The story title is elaborately hand-drawn, with “Wollstonecraft” misspelled.

Author Julius Muller prominently copyrights his version of Mary Shelley’s public domain title. Muller’s name — sometimes as J. W. Muller — appears in the Library of Congress Catalog of Copyright Entries for 1909 as copyright owner for his versions of Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon and William Beckford’s Vathek. Muller is listed as a resident of Glen Falls, New York, and his publisher as Associated Literary Press of New York.

Muller begins with a short intro, evoking the famous story contest at Villa Diodati that inspired Mary Shelley. “The novelty of the idea,” Muller writes, “the weird horror of the theme and the skill of the story’s construction, added to the purely literary excellences it contained, made it famous at once and its fame has endured now unabated for nearly a century.”

Using a descriptive third person voice for his adaptation, Muller cuts to the chase, drops the arctic opening and opens with Victor Frankenstein’s narrative. The main events are all here, up to the polar conclusion. Muller’s last paragraph reads, “The monster sprang through the open port and was lost in the darkness and the distance. Walton was obliged to return with his quest unsatisfied and he told to his relatives the strange story of Frankenstein, which they attributed to machinations bred by the Arctic solitudes.”

Today, abridged version of Frankenstein are very common and in constant supply, usually pitched to younger readers, often embellished with illustrations. Back in 1910, Mary Shelley’s story had already served as inspiration for numerous adaptations, often derived from stage plays and increasingly removed from the original. Julius Muller’s ‘Classic in a Page’ Frankenstein of 1910 is an early attempt at condensing the novel itself, and it makes for an interesting curio.  

Percy Shelley, by Casanave and Vandermeulen

Under a cover evoking William Powell Firth’s painting of their courtship at the Old Saint Pancras churchyard, here is the first of a two-volume French-language biography in graphic novel form of the Shelleys, Percy and Mary.

Book One, Percy Shelley, cuts to the chase, opening with Percy’s expulsion from Oxford in 1811 upon publication of his blasphemous pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism.

Disinherited by his well-to-do father, Percy elopes with and marries Harriet Westbrook, embarking on a perilous life of perpetual flight, always racing to stay ahead of creditors.

When he grows unhappy with his marriage, Percy abandons his pregnant wife and elopes anew, this time with young Mary, daughter of Percy’s mentor, philosopher William Godwin. Percy and Mary had courted, meeting in secret at the grave of Mary’s mother, the famous and mutually admired Mary Wollstonecraft.

The book ends with Percy, Mary and Mary’s half-sister, Claire Clairmont, leaving the Godwin house hand in hand. “Come,” Percy says, “let us live our lives as if it were a novel!”

Writer David Vandermeulen crafts an honest portrait of Percy Shelley as a reckless idealist, arrogant and infinitely charming, strong in his opinions but frail in health. Vandermeulen’s works include a graphic novel biography of Fritz Haber, the father of chemical warfare.

Percy Shelley is beautifully rendered by Daniel Casanave’s nervous pen, with colors by Patrice Larcenet. Casanave has often mixed classic literature with the comics medium, illustrating stories by Apollinaire, Shakespeare and Kafka, Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, and biographies of Baudelaire and Verlaine.

Percy Shelley, 76 pages, was published by Le Lombard of Brussels, February 2012. The followup book, Mary Shelley, was published in May. I’ll report on that one at a later date.

Read an 8-page sample of Percy Shelley (in French), and here are 11 pages from Mary Shelley. 

Found! Frankenstein inscribed by Mary Shelley to Lord Byron!

A true treasure has come to light: A rare, first edition copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, inscribed “To Lord Byron from the author”.

The book was among the possessions of Baron Jay (1907-1996), a British politician and one time President of the Board of Trade. The discovery was made by the Baron’s grandson, bibliophile Sammy Jay. Although Mary Shelley did not sign her name, her writing has been verified by an expert of the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, where Mary’s manuscript pages of Frankenstein are kept.

It was Lord Byron who, in the summer of 1816, invited the Shelleys to join him at Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, and it was Byron who proposed a friendly competition, to come up with ghost stories. Mary’s idea grew into the novel, Frankenstein, and published on New Year’s Day, 1818. The copy at hand is one of only six copies given Mary by her publisher. Inscribed, it was mailed to Byron by Mary’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Lord Byron once recommended the book to a friend, saying, “Methinks it is a wonderful work of a girl of nineteen — not nineteen indeed — at the time”.

First edition copies of Frankenstein are rare and can fetch upwards of $100,000. Until now, only one other signed copy was known to exist, and although this new find is incomplete — originally published as three slim books, here, only the first volume has survived — it was inscribed to and once owned by Lord Byron who, as it were, attended the birth of Frankenstein. Given the remarkable provenance, this unique copy is estimated to be worth over £400,000 (roughly US$635,000).

The book will be displayed for one week, beginning September 26, at Peter Harrington’s of Chelsea, London, one of the world’s leading rare book dealers.

Read more about Lord Byron’s copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein on the Peter Harrington website.

Via PR Newswire Service

Mary Shelley, by Cailey Tervo

Cailey Tervo describes herself as “a young artist doing her best to do better”. Judging from this portrait of Mary Shelley, captured in a few lines and muted colors, Ms Tervo is well on her way to great things.

The image is one of a digital sketchbook series called Fearsome Ladies. It was originally posted last week, on August 30, Mary’s 215th birthday. 

Cailey Tervo’s portfolio and blog.

Shelley's Ghost in New York

An important exhibition celebrating the literary and cultural legacy of Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, and Mary’s parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, first presented at Oxford’s Bodleian Library a year ago, has come to North America. Shelley’s Ghost is presently showing until June 24 at the New York Public Library.

The exhibition includes letters, diaries, art and artifacts and, seen for the first time ever outside England, actual manuscript pages from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. A number of companion activities are scheduled, with more to be announced along the way.

There are a number of documents online: The NYPL’s exhibition page and companion website featuring numerous links, and an Illustrated Biography of Mary Shelley by Charles Cuykendall Carter and artist Derek Marks.

There is also an exhibition companion volume available from the Library’s bookshop.

I’ll be traveling to New York to see this later this spring, and I’ll report back.

Related:
Shelley's Ghost at the Bodleian

Mary's Dream, a Tell-Tale Moon and the Creation of Frankenstein

An article in the November 2011 issue of Sky & Telescope reveals the precise moment, down to date and hour, when Mary Shelley conceived of Frankenstein.

In her introduction to the 1831 edition of the novel, Mary described a dream in which she saw “the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together”, and how “the hideous phantasm of a man” came alive “on the working of some powerful engine”. Brought awake by the startling vision, Mary wrote, “I see them still; the very room, the dark parquet, the closed shutters, with the moonlight struggling through, and the sense I had that the glassy lake and white high Alps were beyond.

Now, the moment of revelation has been pinpointed.

Dr. Don Olson, an astrophysicist at Texas State University-San Marcos, practices the unconventional science of “forensic astronomy”. Working with fellow scientists and students, matching the tantalizing clues found in text, archives and maps with the irrefutable logic of star charts, tide schedules and field expeditions, Dr. Olson has solved historical puzzles, revealing new information, new layers of meaning and a new appreciation for famous moments in history and art.

Among other discoveries, Olson and his team have re-dated Caesar’s invasion of Britain in 55 BC; explained how a rare low tide doomed the Marines at Tarawa Beach in 1943, and how a rising moon led to the tragic sinking of the USS Indianapolis in 1945. In significant contributions to art history, Olson has pinpointed the exact locations and the precise moments captured in paintings by such artists as William Blake, Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch, notably identifying the tortured sky in Munch’s The Scream as the planet-spanning effect of the Krakatoa eruption. Olson can even tell the exact instant when Ansel Adams clicked the shutter on his most famous photograph.

In literature, Olson has studied Chaucer, Whitman and identified Hamlet’s star as a supernova. Now, turning to Mary Shelley, Olsen and his collaborators have settled the issue of when, exactly, Frankenstein was conceived.

The clue lay in Mary’s description of moonlight “struggling” through closed shutters. Based on lunar cycles and confirming results on a field trip to Villa Diodati at Cologny, Switzerland, Olson was able to determine which of two recorded dates for Mary’s inspiration was the correct one. On June 22, 1816, a waning moon rode too low to illuminate Mary’s room, but the other documented date, June 16, proved just right as a gibbous moon rose high and bright enough to be noticed by the awakened Mary. Working out the angles, Olson is also able to attest that the moon shone into Mary’s bedroom at 2 AM.
  

As morning came, Mary writes, “I announced that I had thought of a story. I began that day with the words, ‘It was on a dreary night of November,’ making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream.”

Thus confirmed, Mary Shelley began Frankenstein on June 16, 1816. The moon tells us so.

Sky & Telescope magazine, and a digital preview of the November 2011 issue.

Don Olson’s website at Texas State University.

From the Frankensteinia Archives:Genesis of Frankenstein

Significant anniversaries this past week: It was 195 years ago that Mary Shelley first conceived of Frankenstein, and it was 80 years ago that Robert Florey filmed a now legendary and famously lost test reel, with Bela Lugosi, for Frankenstein at Universal Studios. Here, from our Archives, is a post celebrating these events.

June 15, 16 and 17 are important dates in Frankenstein history.

In 1816, on the evening of June 16 and late into the night, the very concept of Frankenstein was first seeded.

In the spring and summer of that year, the extreme weather conditions created by the massive Tambora volcano explosion blanketed Europe with violent thunderstorms. Out on Lake Geneva, at Cologny, the vacationing Lord Byron and his guests were confined within the walls of the Villa Diodati. As rain poured and thunder cannonaded across the Jura, Byron, his physician John Polidori, his friend Percy Shelley, Shelley’s companion and wife to be Mary Godwin, and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont gathered around the fireplace and entertained themselves as best they could.

On that appropriately stormy night of June 16, Byron read aloud from a book called Fantasmagoriana, a 1812 French translation of a German collection of ghost tales. Influenced by the stories — as described in the book’s subtitle, of specters, revenants and phantoms — Byron suggested a game. “We will each write a ghost story”, he said.

As Mary wrote in the 1831 introduction to Frankenstein, “I busied myself to think of a story, a story to rival those which had excited us to this task.” It would take a few days before inspiration struck, as Mary claimed, in a waking dream. The first reference to Frankenstein would appear in her diary on June 24.

One hundred and fifteen years later, in 1931, writer-director Robert Florey and a skeleton crew assembled on the leftover sets from Dracula, the stairs cleaned of their cobwebs and the parquet redressed with lab equipment, to shoot the legendary — and lost — Frankenstein test reel, with Bela Lugosi as The Monster. Rehearsals were held on June 15, filming proceeded on the 16th and 17th. Though accounts differ wildly as to Lugosi’s appearance in makeup, the test, reportedly twenty minutes long, was the talk of Universal. Within ten days, James Whale had exercised his power at the studio and taken over from Florey, and the project was on its way.

Frankenstein was inspired by a book of quaint ghost stories and a parlor game for bored and excitable intellectuals. On the very same day, one hundred and fifteen years later, Robert Florey directed the screen test for the first talking Frankenstein picture.

The first event was the genesis for Frankenstein. The second one made Frankenstein an icon.

Previous posts: The Villa Diodati. Mount Tambora.

Fantasmagoria is available again, complete and in a new English translation.

Shelley's Ghost

A rediscovered painting of Mary Shelley, never shown before, is just one of the treasures currently on display at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England. The small oil painting, dated to 1843 and attributed to Richard Rothwell, surfaced in 1955 and has only recently been recognized for what it is. Another, later portrait of Mary by the same artist is quite famous.

Shelley’s Ghost is an extraordinary exhibition devoted to Mary Shelley, her parents William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and husband Percy Bysshe Shelley. On show are notebooks, letters, art and artifacts, over 100 pieces in all, including the original manuscript of Frankenstein and precious personal objects such as Mary’s delicate dressing case and Percy’s carefully preserved baby rattle.

One particularly poignant object is an elaborate gilt display containing locks of Mary, Percy and their child Florence’s hair, along with one of Percy’s quill pens.

There was a time when a snippet of hair was a prized memento and Mary no doubt cherished these souvenirs of her beloved Percy. One of his tresses is dated 1822, the year he died. Mary was apparently generous with her own clipped curls. Mary Shelley expert and collector Daniel Raymond of Montreal reports that another lock of Mary’s hair, originally sent to an admirer, is kept at the New York Public Library.

Barring a trip to England, Shelley’s Ghost can be experienced through its dedicated and amazingly complete website, a stunning achievement in itself. All the exhibits are pictured and heavily annotated, and you can even read Frankenstein in manuscript form. There are numerous supplements including podcast readings of letters and poetry, contemporary music, and a map of a walking tour of Shelley in Oxford. There's also a fascinating video introduction by the show's curator, Stephen Hebron. The site’s layout is beautifully realized, navigation is easy and perfectly intuitive. One hopes the site, a significant resource, will stay up well after the show closes, come March 27.

Click through to the Shelley’s Ghost website and explore the lives and works of a remarkable literary family.

Shelley’s Ghost website.

Frankenstein manuscript.

Shelley's Ghost: Reshaping the Image of a Literary Family is the exhibition's companion book, by Stephen Hebron and Elizabeth C. Denlinger.

Related:
Portraits of Mary Shelley

Young Romantics A Guest Review by the Vicar of VHS

Keys to understanding Frankenstein are found in understanding its author, Mary Shelley: Her influences, her life, her entourage, and the era she lived in. Many answers can be found in the new and highly touted group biography, Young Romantics, by British scholar Daisy Hay.

I’m delighted to welcome a fellow blogger, the virtual Vicar of VHS, one-half of the dastardly duo perpetrating the maddening Mad Mad Mad Mad Movies blog, as an unlikely but strangely fitting Guest Reviewer. You may be surprised, as I was, to learn that The Vicar — he stubbornly refuses to answer to any other name — is a published author and poet! Lord Byron, The Vicar informs me, is his favorite Romantic poet, and Lord Fauntleroy his role model. “One day” he says, “I hope to pose for an oil portrait in Arabesque costume.”

Here is The Vicar of VHS’ review of Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry's Greatest Generation, by Daisy Hay.

There is certainly no shortage of biographies devoted to the key figures in the Romantic movement of English poetry. The short, tragic life of John Keats, the proto-rock star adventures of Lord Byron, and the tumultuous relationship of Percy Bysshe and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley have been the subject of countless published histories since their deaths, and continue to fascinate aspiring scholars and casual readers alike. In fact, so much has been written about each of the group's members that it might seem there's nothing new to be said. To take on any one of these monumental figures in print is to risk merely treading a well-worn trail and repeating all the anecdotes that have long since passed into common knowledge and literary legend.

However, author Daisy Hay manages a fresh approach in her first book, Young Romantics. Her book is the story not of any one Romantic figure, but of all of them--or rather, of the by-turns cohesive and shifting social circle of which they were a part. In doing so, Hay paints a fascinating picture of these often larger-than-life personalities, and also the way those personalities and events interacted to shape what she calls "English Poetry's Greatest Generation."

Hay takes as her focus publisher and author Leigh Hunt, a figure little-remembered outside scholarly circles, but who was instrumental in the publication and rise to fame of many of the Romantic era's greatest poets. Often imprisoned for debt and libel, Hunt was nonetheless able to maintain a salon where he received frequent visits from the literary giants of the age (thanks to influential friends and the nature of life for an aristocrat in debtors' prison at the time). As Keats, Byron, the Shelleys, and others pass in and out of Hunt's circle, Hay sketches the events that occasioned their meetings, friendships, and sometimes tumultuous fallings-out. In doing so she succeeds in giving the reader not only the essential information about each poet and writer's career, but in creating an immersive portrait of the time and place in which they worked, and the important relationships that shaped their lives and in some cases nearly destroyed their reputations.

Of particular interest to readers of Frankensteinia is Hays' detailed treatment of the relationship between Percy Bysshe and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The author traces the couple's relationship from its very beginnings, hitting such touchstones as Shelley's expulsion from Oxford University for atheism, his legendary (and perhaps apocryphal) courtship of the teenaged Mary on the site of her famous mother's tomb, and of course the fabled summer at the Villa Diodati with Byron, Polidori, and Mary's half-sister Claire Clairmont. The composition of Frankenstein, its publication and popularity, and its importance to Mary's financial well-being in later life (after Percy Shelley's tragic death by drowning left her and her children destitute) are all compellingly detailed, as are the tragedies of Mary's lost children and Claire's protracted struggles with Byron over their illegitimate daughter. Hay explains the scandals caused by themes of free love and incest that pervaded not only Shelley and Byron's work but also that of Hunt and others, and how public perception of the group was shaped (sometimes justly) by them.

The book contains a wealth of information for anyone interested in Romantic poetry generally and the Shelleys in partcular. Included in photo plates are many famous portraits of Mary Shelley, the famous painting "The Funeral of Shelley" by Louis Fournier (with entertaining commentary on the painting's accuracy, or lack thereof), and manuscript pages from Frankenstein in Mary's own hand, with marginalia by Percy Shelley showing a deft editorial hand. I was surprised to find one of the more memorable-to-me lines from the book, wherein Frankenstein laments that at university "I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth," was apparently suggested by Percy, as can be seen on the page.

Hays' treatment of the triumphs and tribulations of the other figures of the Romantic movement are just as entertaining and informative. Part biography, part history, and part soap opera, The Young Romantics might not have the focus and depth of some scholarly works, but is definitely more fun. If you're interested in Frankenstein, Romantic poetry, or just literature generally, I can highly recommend it.

Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry's Greatest Generation by Daisy Hay (2010, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Daisy Hay’s website
A video interview with Daisy Hay
A 3-part podcast from Blackwell Online

The Vicar of VHS’ Mad Mad Mad Mad Movies blog.

Related:
The Funeral of Shelley

Young Mary Shelley, by Esao Andrews

The introduction to Esao Andrews’ current exhibition at the Jonathan Levine Gallery in New York states that the artist’s “distinctly figurative oil paintings on wood panel feature dark, surreal characters set within haunted atmospheres, blending erotic and often frightening imagery to form a ghost-like underworld.”

Andrews’ atmospheric portrait captures the proud spirit and inner strength of a Young Mary Shelley, as she might have appeared around the time she wrote Frankenstein. Posing against a heavily textured background of foreboding clouds, the morbid themes of her novel and the tragedies that hounded her life are called up by a dark, batwing shawl out of which peer an owl, a death’s head, snake, feather and eye motifs. Her dress seems to deteriorate into diaphanous lace, as if woven from cobwebs and blood.

Explore Esao Andrews’ remarkable art on his excellent website.

Art from Andrews’ exhibition, Solid Void, which runs until October 9, 2010, is on view on the Jonathan Levine Gallery website.

Mary Shelley Portraits

There are very few portraits of Mary Shelley, born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin on this day, August 30, in 1797. Sadly, she never sat for a photographer, though the technology was available over the last decade of her life.

The two paintings above were done from actual sittings, twenty years apart. Most other known portraits, in oils or pen, were made after Mary's death, based on earlier sketches or descriptions by her son, Percy Florence.

Samuel John Stump’s portrait from 1820 shows a young Mary at her writing desk. She smiles shyly, lost in thought, fiddling with a locket. Stump was best known for his portraits of stage celebrities, and a series of famous landscapes.

The 1840 painting is by her friend, Irish-born Richard Rothwell who, for a time, was considered the finest portraitist in Britain. Mary appears with big brown eyes and luminous skin on a field of dark colors, a striking image of a refined and melancholic lady.

Both works come together brilliantly as inspiration for David Levine's caricature, published in the March 21, 1974 issue of The New York Review of Books. Levine, who passed away in 2009, was one of America’s finest artists, a master of pen and ink likenesses and editorial cartoon commentary.

The Funeral of Shelley: The Art and the Reality

An 1889 oil painting by Louis Édouard Fournier, The Funeral of Shelley, depicts a somber ceremony as the body of Percy Bysshe Shelley is cremated on a Tuscany beach, July 18, 1822.

The scene is wildly inaccurate in all its details.

Death shadowed Mary Shelley’s life. Her very birth came at a terrible cost as her mother died within ten days. As a young woman, Mary would lose three of her four children to childhood illness, and she was still recuperating from a miscarriage that almost killed her when her beloved Percy drowned at sea.

The Shelleys, in perpetual flight from political reprobation, scandal and persistent debt, had settled in Italy by 1819. There, though he had no experience as a sailor — he couldn’t even swim — Percy had purchased a boat. In early July of 1822, he sailed to Livorno to meet with Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt to discuss a project for a new radical magazine. On the 8th, Percy and three other men set out on their return trip to Lerici. They never arrived.

The official story has Percy’s boat caught and sunk in a sudden squall. Mary would attribute the tragedy to a faulty design that capsized the vessel. Another story circulated that the boat was deliberately rammed, Shelley’s assassination for holding subversive views.

On July 12, Percy’s body washed ashore on a beach near Viareggio and was promptly buried there by locals. Italian health laws prescribed cremation and on July 18, Shelley’s friends and fellow authors carried out the grim ceremony.

Fournier’s 1889 painting depicts a bleak, windswept beach, the witnesses swaddled in heavy coats against the cold. At the back, Mary Shelley kneels in prayer. In the foreground, friends and fellow authors Edward John Trelawny, Hunt and Byron strike dramatic, grieving poses. A peaceful Shelley, as if asleep, is stretched out on his smoking pyre. But it’s all wrong.

July 18 was actually a hot, sunny day. Mary Shelley, as was the custom of the times, did not attend. Leigh Hunt sat out the event in a nearby carriage. Byron, upset at the proceedings and suffering from the heat, cooled off in the surf, eventually to swim out to his own boat, leaving Trelawny alone on the beach. Shelley’s body, badly decomposed, the face and hands gone, was burned in a metal furnace lugged out to the shore by hired help.

In the end, Trelawny plucked Shelley’s carbonized heart from the ashes as a gruesome souvenir for himself, but he was eventually persuaded to give it to Mary, who preserved the relic for the rest of her life. Contrary to various reports, the heart was not returned to Shelley’s grave or buried with Mary, in 1851. It was interred with their son, Percy Florence Shelley, in 1889, the very year that Fournier painted The Funeral of Shelley.

There was nothing of the romantic gesture, suggested by Fournier’s art, in the actual cremation of Shelley’s remains. His friends had gathered in respect and duty, to oversee the proper and speedy disposal of his body. In life, Percy Shelley had been ostracized and censored as a subversive. The news of his demise was reported in the conservative Courier of London with cold sarcasm: “Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned, now he knows whether there is a God or not.”

By 1889, almost seventy years on, Shelley’s disrepute had faded from popular memory and he was now acclaimed as one of the great poets, his works studied and revered. Shelley’s deserved fame was largely due to Mary having tirelessly spent the second half of her life collecting, editing, praising and promoting his writings. It was this Shelley, the poet genius who died tragically young, that Fournier elevated with his highly imaginative interpretation.

The Funeral of Shelley (sometimes referred to as The Cremation of Shelley) is Louis Édouard Fournier’s most famous painting. Fournier (1857-1917) was best known for his large-scale frescoes, notably the superb mosaic friezes — recently restored — decorating the Grand Palais on the Champs-Élysées, in Paris.

The painting currently resides at the Walker Art Gallery, an institution of the Art Museums of Liverpool.

Mary Shelley's Birthday

“As a child I scribbled; and my favourite pastime, during the hours given me for recreation, was to "write stories." Still I had a dearer pleasure than this, which was the formation of castles in the air -- the indulging in waking dreams -- the following up trains of thought, which had for their subject the formation of a succession of imaginary incidents. My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings.”

— Mary Shelley

In honor of her birthday, August 30^th, 1797, this haunting portrait of Mary Shelley, as envisioned by New Zealand painter Sarah Dolby.

Sarah Dolby’s website, and a gallery of her works.