Compiled by David S. Miall, University of Alberta
Percy Bysshe Shelley made numerous revisions to the manuscript of Frankenstein before publication. A detailed discussion is provided by Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York and London: Routledge, 1988). A small sample of her evidence is provided below.
For example, here is one passage by Mary:
Nor were these my only visions. The raising of ghosts or devils was also a favorite pursuit and if I never saw any I attributed it rather to my own inexperience and mistakes than want of skill in my instructors.
This passage is revised by Percy (Butler, p. 24):
Nor were these my only visions. The raising of ghosts or devils was a promise liberally accorded by my favorite authors, the fulfillment of which I most eagerly sought; and if my incantations were always unsuccessful, I attributed the failure rather to my own inexperience and mistake, than to a want of skill or fidelity in my instructors.
Mellor notes that Percy consistently changes Mary's colloquial language to his "more learned, polysyllabic terms" (p. 60). In her table of revisions, shown below in part, Mary's term on the left is replaced by Percy's term on the right:
| MARY | PERCY |
|---|---|
| have | possess |
| wish | desire, purpose |
| caused | derive their origin from |
| a painting | a representation |
| place | station |
| plenty of | sufficient |
| time | period |
| felt | endured |
| hope | confidence |
| had | experienced |
| stay | remain |
| took away | extinguish |
| talked | conversed |
For other evidence see also the Appendix to Mellor's study.
Mary Shelley hoped that a new, cheap edition of Frankenstein would be issued by the publisher Bentley. To make the novel more acceptable, she revised it extensively. The changes are conveniently tabulated in Appendix B of Frankenstein 1818, ed. Marilyn Butler (Oxford, 1994). Here is one example, starting at the passage shown above, in which a substantial section has been deleted:
| 1818 | 1831 |
|---|---|
Nor were these my only visions. The raising of ghosts or devils was a promise liberally accorded by my favourite authors, the fulfilment of which I most eagerly sought; and if my incantations were always unsuccessful, I attributed the failure rather to my own inexperience and mistake, than to a want of skill or fidelity in my instructors. The natural phaenomena that take place every day before our eyes did not escape my examinations. Distillation, and the wonderful effects of steam, processes of which my favourite authors were utterly ignorant, excited my astonishment; but my utmost wonder was engaged by some experiments on an airpump, which I saw employed by a gentleman whom we were in the habit of visiting. The ignorance of the early philosophers on these and several other points served to decrease their credit with me: but I could not entirely throw them aside, before some other system should occupy their place in my mind. When I was about fifteen years old . . . | Nor were these my only visions. The raising of ghosts or devils was a promise liberally accorded by my favourite authors) the fulfilment of which I most eagerly sought; and if my incantations were always unsuccessful, I attributed the failure rather to my own inexperience and mistake, than to a want of skill or fidelity in my instructors. And thus for a time I was occupied by exploded systems, mingling, like an unadept, a thousand contradictory theories, and floundering desperately in a very slough of multifarious knowledge, guided by an ardent imagination and childish reasoning, till an accident again changed the current of my ideas. When I was about fifteen years old . . .
|
Some example comments from reviews of the first edition of Frankenstein are provided here. For the complete reviews see under Mary Shelley in the Gothic section of the Romanticism hypertext (in Tory B39).
Our readers will guess from this summary, what a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity this work presents. -- It is piously dedicated to Mr. Godwin, and is written in the spirit of his school. The dreams of insanity are embodied in the strong and striking language of the insane, and the author, notwithstanding the rationality of his preface, often leaves us in doubt whether he is not as mad as his hero. -- Quarterly Review 18 (January, 1818).
It is no slight merit in our eyes, that the tale, though wild in incident, is written in plain and forcible English, without exhibiting that mixture of hyperbolic Germanisms with which tales of wonder are usually told, as if it were necessary that the language should be as extravagant as the fiction. The ideas of the author are always clearly as well as forcibly expressed; and his descriptions of landscape have in them the choice requisites of truth, freshness, precision, and beauty. -- Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 2 (March, 1818); review by Walter Scott.
Here is one of the productions of the modern school in its highest style of caricature and exaggeration. It is formed on the Godwinian manner, and has all the faults, but many likewise of the beauties of that model. In dark and gloomy views of nature and of man, bordering too closely on impiety, -- in the most outrageous improbability, -- in sacrificing every thing to effect, -- it even goes beyond its great prototype; but in return, it possesses a similar power of fascination, something of the same mastery in harsh and savage delineations of passion, relieved in like manner by the gentler features of domestic and simple feelings. There never was a wilder story imagined, yet, like most of the fictions of this age, it has an air of reality attached to it, by being connected with the favourite projects and passions of the times. -- Edinburgh Magazine New Series 2 (March, 1818)
We need scarcely say, that these volumes have neither principle, object, nor moral; the horror which abounds in them is too grotesque and bizarre ever to approach near the sublime, and when we did not hurry over the pages in disgust, we sometimes paused to laugh outright; and yet we suspect, that the diseased and wandering imagination, which has stepped out of all legitimate bounds, to frame these disjointed combinations and unnatural adventures, might be disciplined into something better. -- British Critic 9 (April, 1818).
Exploring towards the North Pole. From Daines Barrington, Miscellanies (London, 1781).
The celebrated Mr. Boyle, from these and many other instances, rejected the long received notion that the Pole was the principle of cold. Captain Jonas Poole, who in 1610 sailed in a vessel of seventy tons to make discoveries towards the North, found the weather warm in near seventy-nine degrees of latitude, whilst the ponds and lakes were unfrozen, which put him in hopes of finding a mild summer, and led him to believe, that a passage might be as soon found by the Pole as any other way whatever; and for this reason, that the Sun gave a great heat there, and that the ice was not near so thick as what he had met with in the latitude of seventy-three. Indeed, the Dutchmen, who pretend to have advanced within a degree of the Pole, said it was as hot there as in the summer at Amsterdam.
Humphry Davy. From A Discourse introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry (1802).
As a branch of sublime philosophy, chemistry is far from being perfect. It consists of a number of collections of facts connected together by different relations; but as yet it is not furnished with a precise and beautiful theory. Though we can perceive, develope, and even produce, by means of our instruments of experiment, an almost infinite variety of minute phænomena, yet we are incapable of determining the general laws by which they are governed; and in attempting to define them, we are lost in obscure, though sublime imaginations concerning unknown agencies. That they may be discovered, however, there is every reason to believe. And who would not be ambitious of becoming acquainted with the most profound secrets of nature, of ascertaining her hidden operations, and of exhibiting to men that system of knowledge which relates so intimately to their own physical and moral constitution?
The future is composed merely of images of the past, connected in new arrangements by analogy, and modified by the circumstances and feelings of the moment; our hopes are founded upon our experience; and in reasoning concerning what may be accomplished, we ought not only to consider the immense field of research yet unexplored, but likewise to examine the latest operations of the human mind, and to ascertain the degree of its strength and activity.
Galvanism. From Giovanni Aldini, An Account of the Late Improvements in Galvanism (1803).
EXPERIMENT XXII.
The first of these decapitated criminals being conveyed to the apartment provided for my experiments, in the neighbourhood of the place of execution, the head was first subjected to the Galvanic action. For this purpose I had constructed a pile consisting of a hundred pieces of silver and zinc. Having moistened the inside of the ears with salt water, I formed an arc with two metallic wires, which, proceeding from the two ears, were applied, one to the summit and the other to the bottom of the pile. When this communication was established, I observed strong contractions in the muscles of the face, which were contorted in so irregular a manner that they exhibited the appearance of the most horrid grimaces. The action of the eye-lids was exceedingly striking, though less sensible in the human head than in that of an ox.
Percy Shelley on the Mer-de-Glace, Chamonix. From History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817).
On all sides precipitous mountains, the abodes of unrelenting frost, surround this vale: their sides are banked up with ice and snow, broken, heaped high, and exhibiting terrific chasms. The summits are sharp and naked pinnacles, whose overhanging steepness will not even permit snow to rest upon them. Lines of dazzling ice occupy here and there their perpendicular rifts, and shine through the driving vapours with inexpressible brilliance: they pierce the clouds like things not belonging to this earth. The vale itself is filled with a mass of undulating ice, and has an ascent sufficiently gradual even to the remotest abysses of these horrible desarts. It is only half a league (about two miles) in breadth, and seems much less. It exhibits an appearance as if frost had suddenly bound up the waves and whirlpools of a mighty torrent. We walked some distance upon its surface. The waves are elevated about 12 or 15 feet from the surface of the mass, which is intersected by long gaps of unfathomable depth, the ice of whose sides is more beautifully azure than the sky. In these regions every thing changes, and is in motion. This vast mass of ice has one general progress, which ceases neither day nor night; it breaks and bursts for ever: some undulations sink while others rise; it is never the same. The echo of rocks, or of the ice and snow which fall from their overhanging precipices, or roll from their aerial summits, scarcely ceases for one moment. One could think that Mont Blanc, like the god of the Stoics, was a vast animal, and that the frozen blood for ever circulated through his stony veins.
Last updated Saturday, August 31, 1996