Frankenstein, Volume Three, Chapter Seven

In which Victor vows vengeance, pursues to the perilous pole, is saved by the stranded sailors, and all are awfully angsty.



And that concludes Frankenstein! It took us a while, but we made it. I admit, this last bit especially is a bit of a slog (sorry it's so long, I really just couldn't make another all-Robert-Walton installment), with us returning to the framing story we don't really care about and everyone talking about how miserable they are. What really sort of gets me in this section (as you can probably tell from my interjection at one point) is how both Walton and the monster sort of lionize Victor, and bemoan his sad fall due to persecution from the creature. Yes, Victor had a tragic downfall, but it was of his own making. He's not the hero of this story. No one is, really, nor is anyone truly the villain (notice I never used the "iconic villain debut" tag in this book). And I'm not talking about "oh, his actions had terrible consequences that he couldn't possibly have foreseen," because he created a giant, sentient, intelligent creature and then just abandons it. How could something bad possibly come from that?

ANYWAY. This final cover comes from a 1934 edition published by Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, with cover and illustrations by Lynd Ward (1905-1985). Ward was a very influential artist, best known for his engraved wood illustrations, particularly in his series of "wordless novels" that strongly influenced the development of the graphic novel. He also illustrated hundreds of children's books, won the 1953 Caldecott Medal for his book The Biggest Bear, and of course illustrated a number of classics, such as Frankenstein here.

Man, look at that! I love the art deco / German expressionistic look of this. It's like Fritz Lang directed this book cover. Also, hee, monster butt. I really wish I could've used his illustrations in my posts, because they're just magnificent, really. Check out Victor and the monster on the glacier! The monster running among lightning trees! William's murder! Victor with his chemistry equipment! Hey, wait, that looks a lot... oh, Airmont Classics. You plagiarizing scamps. (UPDATE: I forgot to link to the main site, where you can see a whole bunch more of the illustrations from this edition! DISCLAIMER: The guy who compiled the site is an author on an apparent crusade to prove that not Mary but Percy Shelley wrote Frankenstein, a position I do not support.)

Just a couple of quick notes in this one, as most of the being miserable was fairly straightforward. At 6:36, Victor pursues the monster into Tartary and Russia, where Tartary was a large chunk of central and northern Asia that included Mongolia, Siberia, Turkestan, and Manchuria, among other regions. This is of course where the Tartars we met in "Sleepy Hollow" came from.

At 33:38, Walton's letter from September 12th recounts how the ice broke up on September 9th. Well, the text actually says "September 19th" there, which was presumably a typesetting error in the 1818 edition due to the printer assuming that it was supposed to be the date of the next letter and thus should have a later number. It was corrected in later printings, so I figured I'd just change it myself rather than leave it weird and confusing.

Last, 48:21 the monster talks about Felix driving him from his door "with contumely," which basically means "with insulting and humiliating treatment."

And that's a wrap! We're going to lighten things up a bit with our short story interlude, as well as our next book. Stay tuned!


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!

Frankenstein, Volume One, Letters I to IV

In which some guy mounts a voyage to try to sail across the North Pole or something, and meets a mysterious, sorrowful man in the Arctic waste; and in which our narrator goes on at some length on the novel's background information.



FRANKENSTEIN! Yes, the book that essentially invented the entire genre of science fiction, and actually quite different than the story most people are familiar with through adaptations. As discussed at some length in my intro, the story famously grew out of a contest held between Mary (then 18-year-old Mary Godwin); her lover, the married Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; her also-18-year-old pregnant step-sister, Claire Clairmont; her lover and father of her child, the other major Romantic poet, Lord Byron; and Byron's physician-who-was-also-a-writer John Polidori. They were all visiting Geneva, Switzerland, in the summer of 1816, "The Year Without a Summer," where they spent some prolonged periods inside due to the poor weather and amused themselves by reading ghost stories. Byron suggested a contest where they would each write their own ghost story. Byron started and abandoned a "Fragment of a (vampire) Novel," which Polidori turned into the novella "The Vampyre," generally considered the beginning of the vampire literary genre. Mary, after a period of writer's block, was inspired by a dream to start what would of course become Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus. She worked on it for a couple of years, gave her draft to Percy to fancify-up,* and published it in 1818.

So, there was Mary's more plainspoken, pre-Percy draft (only recently published and which I want), the 1818 edition, and the 1831 "popular" edition. Mary made some major rewrites in this last edition, often stylistic but also with an eye towards making the story more conservative, making the characters more pawns of fate than people who made (or are victims of) bad decisions. This is by far the most reprinted edition, but since I strongly lean towards the free will end of the "destiny" spectrum, I'm going with the 1818 edition. A good rundown of the differences between the editions can be found in this excellent essay by Anne K. Mellor, published in Chapter 9 of her 1988 book Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters, which I also want.

Anyway, there are surprisingly few public domain illustrations for this, considering the book has over a hundred years of public domain editions to pull from. The 1831 edition was, for one, but with only two illustrations. I'll include those, but in the meantime I'll fall back on the covers.

This one is from an 1882 edition published by George Routledge and Sons that looks to be part of a series of sixpence reprints that include this one we saw earlier for Sense and Sensibility. And... I don't know about you, but I get a weird USA patriotic vibe from this one. I mean, it's nice to see the monster depicted before he was forever Karloffed (see: pretty much every other cover we'll be looking at), but the red white, and blue color scheme, the military-uniform-looking outfit, the tricorn hat... just me? Okay.

All right, and lastly, a couple of notes. In the Preface at 8:05, the author states that the central conceit of the novel "has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin... as not of impossible occurrence." This is a different Darwin than the one the Time Traveler was referring to, though it's also not Charles. Here, she's talking about Charles's grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin: physician, poet, physiologist, abolitionist, etc. He had some ideas on species and nature that quite clearly prefigured his grandson's famous theory of evolution, touching on ideas that would later be called natural selection and survival of the fittest. Shelley's probably alluding specifically to Darwin's final work, published posthumously in 1803, The Temple of Nature: or, The Origin of Society: A Poem, with Philosophical Notes. Specifically, she probably means the twelfth note, "Chemical Theory of Electricity and Magnetism."

Finally, Walton's reference at 23:33 to "the land of mist and snow" and his further assurance that he wouldn't kill an albatross (and would thus be okay) are references to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's classic 1798 poem, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." In the poem, a ship is driven by a storm into the Antarctic, from where they are guided out by an albatross. The titular mariner then shoots the bird, for some reason, after which their ship (though now in warmer climes) becomes becalmed in uncharted waters. The crew blames this bad luck on the mariner killing the bird that had saved them, so they force him to wear the dead albatross around his neck in shame. It gets worse from there. But, we don't really care about Walton's fate here, we want to get to Frankenstein!


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!

*Some claim that Percy's contributions were so major that he should be considered at least minor co-author. Some even claim that he's the actual author of the book, and that Mary had little or nothing to do with it. The evidence for these claims generally boils down to "But she's just, like, a CHICK and stuff!"

The Time Machine, Chapters Ten to Twelve and Epilogue

In which our hero swaggers right into an obvious trap, is nearly foiled due to strike-on-box matches, escapes due to time travel, sees the even farther distant future, and returns home; and in which we learn in a wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey way that our framing story narrator's name is "Hillyer.



And that wraps it up for The Time Machine! As mentioned in the recording, there was a deleted scene called "The Grey Man" (deleted by Wells himself) that I have recorded and will be posting separately.

I've got a few covers for you this time, mostly seeming to go with the design philosophy of "eh, good enough."

This first one here on the right is by Everyman's Library from 1978. Now, this is not really "eh, good enough," as obviously someone put a lot of work and thought into this 'cause there's a LOT GOIng on here. We've got Evel Knieval as the Time Traveler, wearing a sweet checked shirt under a... fishing vest? They've got the multiple-exposure thing to represent time travel we saw before, though here they at least added different poses. We've also got the flying numbers, though less subtle here. Oh, and our guy falls down through a vortex, over some geometric planes, some ruler markings or something, and the odd impression that the year 1970 will be important somehow.

More covers and note after the jump!

The Time Machine, Chapters One and Two

In which there is a gathering of unnamed satirical archetypes with much harrumphing and discussions on the nature of Time, and the Time Traveler claims to have traveled in time; and in which the narrator has already used up all of the voices that will be needed in this book.



Yay, new book! We haven't done a full-on science fiction book yet, so we'll start with one that invented or at least codified one of sci-fi's greatest tropes: TIME TRAVEL. As overly discussed in the intro, The Time Machine had kind of an odd publishing history, starting out as one short story in a college newspaper in 1888, then heavily rewritten to be serialized in another newspaper, never concluded, rewritten again to be serialized in another newspaper, and rewritten versions of both of those latter newspaper texts submitted and accepted by two different publishing companies, and published within three weeks of each other in 1895. Of the two book texts, the "Holt" or "American" version and the "Heinemann" or "British" version, named for their respective publishing companies and countries, the latter is by far the most reprinted. There's also the matter of deleted text, a section from a later chapter that Wells included in the serial due to editorial fiat but cut out once he had the chance. It was, however, inexplicably included in whatever cheap book-fair paperback I read back in elementary school, so it may or may not get read later on. We'll see how I feel.

Anyway, for the first time thus far I was unable to find any public domain illustrations for this book. I know, right? So, we'll just have to do what we did to fill in several chapters back in Green Gables, and show covers from various versions over the years. We'll start with the first edition covers:

Photo via the University of California, Riverside

The one on the left is the more well-known Heinemann version, showing the winged sphinx that will play a major part in the story. The Holt version on the right just has the Henry Holt & Co. logo, with an owl on a book. Not... entirely relevant to the story, but understandable, I suppose.

Luckily (?) there are plenty of notes after the jump to fill the void left by the illustrations! Especially in these here early chapters.