In which Mary explicates and perhaps embellishes upon Frankenstein's origin story.
And one final parting shot from Frankenstein before it lumbers off into the sunset! As mentioned way back when we started this book, Shelley rewrote large portions of the original 1818 version for an 1832 edition, and wrote this new introduction for it. I read us the 1818, but feel I should toss this in as well. For an introduction, it's got a surprising number of notes:
4:43 - She mentions that Lord Byron is writing the third canto of Childe Harold, by which she means Childe Harold's Pilgramage, a long, semi-autobiographical narrative poem about a disillusioned young man who broods across the world trying to forget his world-weariness. You can read it here, and see quite literally the invention of the Byronic hero.
5:10 - Here we begin a recounting of the "volumes of ghost stories translated from the German into French" that inspired to story-telling contest that led to Frankenstein. The volume to which she refers is Fantasmagoriana, by an unknown author, published in France in 1812. The French edition was subsequently translated into English by Sarah Utterson in 1820 as Tales of the Dead, which can be read here. She recounts (with variable accuracy) The History of the Inconstant Lover, published in English as The Death-Bride, and "the tale of the sinful founder of his race," which refers to the story The Family Portraits.
5:37 - "in complete armor, but with the beaver up." This is an explicit reference to Horatio's description of the ghost of Hamlet's father, a line that will continue to cause amusement in high school English classes unto eternity. "Beaver," of course, refers to the helmet's visor.
6:23 - Shelley says how Byron published his ghost story as a fragment "at the end of his poem of Mazeppa." Mazeppa (which can be read here) is an 1819 poem of Byron's telling the story of the Ukranian Cossack Ivan Mazepa, most of which is taken up by the hero being tied naked to a horse that is let loose. The "Fragment of a Novel" itself, one of the very first vampire stories in English, inspired Polidori to write the enormously popular and influential novella The Vampyre, which really set the stage for every vampire story to come after it.
6:52 - Polidori's own story for the contest was apparently never published, but recounted here as being about a skull-headed lady punished for looking through a keyhole. Shelley says she "was reduced to a worse condition than the renowned Tom of Coventry." This refers to the tailor who peeked at Lady Godiva's famous nude ride through Coventry to make her husband cut back on the town's taxes. The tailor was rewarded by being struck blind and immortalized in the phrase "peeping Tom."
7:55 - She refers to "Everything must have a beginning" as "speak[ing] in Sanchean phrase," referring to the way Don Quixote's famous sidekick Sancho Panza spouts off proverbs.
8:28 - "Columbus and his egg." Huh, this one seems like something I should've heard of before this. It refers to an apocryphal story about Christopher Columbus, where he responds to criticism that anyone could've made his discovery, and would have eventually anyway, by betting them they couldn't get an egg to stand on its end. They couldn't, and he did by tapping the end to break the shell a bit, flattening it enough to stand on its end. Thus, a brilliant idea that seems simple and obvious after you see someone else do it. Of course, Columbus himself didn't really discover the Americas, so there's that too.
8:59 - "Dr. Darwin." Shelley here mentions the great Dr. Erasmus "grandfather of Charles" Darwin, referring again to his influence on her writing here. Here, though, she specifically mentions the experiments "spoken of as having been done by him" where a piece of vermicelli was preserved in a glass case and spontaneously reanimated. It seems that this is actually a mish-mash of a couple of different things Darwin wrote about in The Temple of Nature, the most pertinent being about dried vorticella (a kind of very simple single-celled organism) coming back to life. "Vermicelli" does in fact literally mean "little worms," but is only ever used to refer to a type of pasta, so... yeah. If this whole thing seems vaguely familiar to you, you probably are remembering this scene from the Mel Brooks classic Young Frankenstein, which is of course a direct reference to this introduction and not anything resembling actual science. (Those of you who listen all the way to the end of the recordings may have noticed that I'm a HUGE fan of Young Frankenstein. If I ever get around to it, I actually have some thoughts on it I may share here.)
Geez, I think these notes are longer than the introduction itself. Anyway, something a little lighter next time!
If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg.
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