Frankenstein, Volume One, Chapters Three and Four

In which Victor meddles in Things Man Was Not Meant to Know and, spoilers, grants life to a cobbled-together creature and promptly freaks the hell out, and best friend Henry appears just in time to play nursemaid.



And now we've passed through the chocolately backstory and into the caramel and crazynuts of the main narrative. And boy, once there Shelley really leaps right into making the creature, doesn't she? Interesting to note some major differences from the popular conception of the story (which, of course, largely comes from the movies): Victor's a student, not a doctor. No castle, and no assistant, hunchbacked or otherwise, just Victor by himself in the attic room of his apartment. And, of course, the appearance of the creature himself, with his lustrous black hair and pearly teeth.

One sort of general note: Victor mentions several times his visits to charnel houses during his studies and, eventually, his supply runs. These were vaults where bodies and/or bones were piled up, often those found when digging new graves and sometimes those excavated specifically to make more room (I mean, hey, are you really using that grave five years down the line?)

At 7:50, Victor says he "was like the Arabian who had been buried with the dead, and found a passage to life aided only by one glimmering, and seemingly ineffectual light." This refers to the Fourth Voyage of Sinbad the Sailor, (who, of course, made seven voyages total). In this specific tale, to be brief, Sinbad is rescued from cannibals by other island natives, befriends their king, and is given a wealthy and beautiful wife. She gets sick and dies, and Sinbad learns that their custom is that both spouses are entombed when one dies, the living one given a jug of water and seven rations of bread to, I guess, prolong their agony. Luckily, when these are used up, a new living/dead pair are tossed into the cave, so Sinbad, uh, kills the still-living wife and takes her food (along with all the burial jewels and finery). After this happens several more times, Sinbad's got a nice little hoard of food, water, and wealth going on, until he follows the little light and/or a wild animal out an escape route to the sea. So... yeah.

Oh, and we've got another illustration! Also involving a glimmering light.

17:07 - "By the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull,
yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive
motion agitated its limbs, ... I rushed out of the room."

And... that's it for the illustrations. It's gonna be covers from now on. A few more notes, though:

22:10 - "Like one who, on a lonely road, / Doth walk in fear and dread, / And, having once turn'd round, walks on, / And turns no more his head; / Because he knows a frightful fiend / Doth close behind him tread." While wandering the streets, Victor brings us another reference (this time, a direct quotation) to "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," much as Walton did in the Letters. In case anyone is nit-picky enough to care (and you know I am), these references rather screw with the supposed timeline of the novel. Coleridge's poem was published in 1798, while Walton's letters were dated December 11th, 17—, to August 19th, 17—. It's possible that both Walton and Victor read the poem (Victor closely enough to memorize passages) in the months before heading up to the Arctic, and those m-dashes conceal 1798 to 1799. Sure. But then, Walton mentioned that they were trapped in the ice "last Monday (July 31st), and July 31, 1799 was a Wednesday. Going back, we first find it on a Monday in 1797, a year before "The Rime" was published! God, it's like Shelley didn't research this AT ALL.

At 22:28, we hear about another mode of conveyance: the diligence. This was a form of stagecoach, a big, sturdy carriage drawn by four or more horses used as a mode of public transport. They could usually seat a bunch of passengers and carry a mess of luggage on the roof.

Last, Henry says that his father was like the "Dutch schoolmaster in The Vicar of Wakefield: 'I have ten thousand florins a year without Greek, I eat heartily without Greek.'" The Vicar of Wakefield was a comedic sentimental novel (or possibly a satire of sentimental novels, depending on who you talk to) from the 1760s that remained popular up through and including the Victorian era.

Okay, so monster's created and immediately abandoned. Let's see how well that turns out!


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

Frankenstein, Volume One, Chapters One and Two

In which we are introduced to Victor Frankenstein, and he relates his backstory of parental death, sweetheart cousin Elizabeth, best friend Henry, fascination with alchemy, and teachers both supportive and non.



All right, so we've broken through the crunchy, frozen outer shell of the framing device and into the smooth, chocolately Swiss backstory of young Victor. This is actually where an interesting change was put in when Shelley edited the story for the 1831 edition. In the original version we're reading, Elisabeth is Victor's cousin, taken in by Victor's father when his sister (Victor's aunt) dies, and Elizabeth's father decides she'd apparently be better with her uncle than with a stepmother. Reading too much Grimm, perhaps.Spoilers, but Elizabeth and Victor become sweethearts, which was not an uncommon thing back then. Charles Darwin, for instance, married his cousin Emma Wedgwood in 1839.

The 1831 edition, in contrast, not only beefs up how much Victor's parents doted on him, but changes Elizabeth into the daughter of an Italian nobleman who, upon his wife's death, left her with a foster family to raise. When the foster father disappeared at war, the family fell into poverty. Victor's parents, traveling through Italy and being of a charitable mindset, frequented the houses of the poor and came across this foster family. They noticed that one of the children "appeared of a different stock. The four others were dark-eyed, hardy little vagrants; this child was thin, and very fair." Obviously, they decided to take this child (and only this child) out of poverty. The family loved her, but wanted the best for her, and so let them take her. Elizabeth was then subsequently given to Victor as a present. Jokingly, but the five-year-old took it seriously.

Personally, I find this 1831 version much creepier and more problematic than the kissing cousins.

Anyway, notes after then jump:

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 Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Part Two

In which Ichabod thoroughly enjoys himself at the party, up until its disappointing end, and has a fateful encounter on the ride home with a horse-mounted man that may or may not have a head.



It's funny, I'd rather forgotten until re-reading this story for the blog that "Sleepy Hollow" doesn't really have any of what you might call "dialogue" in it. Huh.

Illustrations! As last time, the color illustrations are by F. O. C. Darley, 1849, while the black and white ones are by other artists as noted, from 1863.

Oh, first a note for 2:40: the cedar-bird is referred to as wearing a montero cap, which was a type of Spanish hunting cap from the 1600s that has a band going around the crown that can be folded down to protect the ears and/or face, rather like a balaclava.

3:40 - "The Tappan Zee," by John Frederick Kensett

First, the artist. John Frederick Kensett was one of the most well-known and successful artists in the "second generation" of the Hudson River School.  Perhaps his most well-known and longest-lasting contribution to the art world is less his actual work, and more as one of the founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Next, the actual illustration. I probably should've mentioned this last time, but the Tappan Zee is a natural widening of the Hudson River (its widest point, in fact). Its name is taken from the Tappan group of the Lenape tribe, though it's unlikely that's what they called themselves, and the Dutch word "zee," meaning "sea." Several times, the story mentions the bluffs along its edge; these are the basalt cliffs known as the Palisades.

More after the break!

"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Part One

In which we are introduced to the town of Sleepy Hollow; its itinerant schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane; wealthy coquette Katrina Van Tassel; and local hero and roustabout Brom Bones; and in which we hear of the local superstition of the headless horseman; and Ichabod departs for a dinner party.



New short story! One of the most enduring examples of early American fiction, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" was originally published in 1820 as part of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., a collection of Irving's short works. This book is commonly considered, along with James Fenimore Cooper's The Leatherstocking Tales, one of the first works of American literature to be widely read back in Europe. Perhaps even more than anything by Cooper, "Sleepy Hollow" (and Irving's other best-known work, "Rip Van Winkle," also published in The Sketch Book) is one of those stories that has entered the American lexicon. Even those who've never read the story have an idea what you mean when you describe someone as looking like Ichabod Crane, and the image of the Headless Horseman, brandishing his flaming pumpkin aloft, has indelibly etched itself into our collective brain.

The illustrations I've picked out come from two different sources. The color illustrations are by Felix Octavius Carr Darley (more commonly known by F. O. C. Darley, and who can blame him) from an 1849 printing of The Sketch Book. Darley was considered one of the preeminent "genre" illustrators of the mid-1800s, creating watercolors or line illustrations for Irving, Cooper, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Clement C. Moore, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and many more. The black and white illustrations are from an 1863 edition, and are done by a variety of artists, who will be credited by their respective illustrations. Near as I can tell, only a few of these were actually created specifically to illustrate "Sleepy Hollow;" several are landscapes done by prominent local artists known specifically for, well, landscapes, and not for book illustrations, so I think they were preexisting works pressed into service for this printing. Several of said artists were followers of the Hudson River School of art, which focused on romantic landscapes of the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding mountains.

Oh, and due to the length of this story, I've broken it into two parts, of which this is obviously the first.

3:21 - "View in Sleepy Hollow," by William Hart (from a sketch by J. H. Hill)

This is one of those landscape works I mentioned.  William Hart was one of those members of the Hudson River School, and was known for his landscapes involving strong angled sunlight, foreground shadow, and cows. He, uh, painted a lot of cows. He is also the maternal grandfather of E. B. "bet I can make you cry over a spider" White. I haven't been able to figure out for sure who J. H. Hill was, but another of the pictures are by Hart from a sketch of his, so maybe he was some sort of assistant?

Much more after the jump!

The Marvelous Land of Oz, Chapters Twenty-Two to Twenty-Four

In which Mombi is discovered and there is an exciting chase, after which Mombi reveals the secret of Princess Ozma's disappearance, and all is brought to a happy ending; and in which our narrator expostulates at length about the feminist implications and interpretations of the book.



Last installment, and boy have we got some surprises in store for you! Well, one surprise. Maybe.

More after the jump!

The Marvelous Land of Oz, Chapters Nineteen to Twenty-One

In which our heroes manage to escape the jackdaws, restore their ride through mathematical trickery, beg help of Glinda the Good, and begin an attempt to find the rightful ruler of Oz.


All right folks, we've got only one more installment after this one, so we're circling in to the finale!

So jackdaws, mentioned in the last installment but more fully experienced here, are small members of the crow family that generally have black feathers over most of their bodies, with gray on the back of their necks, and light gray eyes (with some differences among the four known subspecies.) They're known for being very vocal -- they can even learn to speak a few words -- and are (as shown in these chapters) known to collect and hoard small items, like their relative the magpie. They mate monogamously and for life, but do live in hierarchical social groups that have been known to make large nesting platforms, as seen here. Of course, real jackdaws probably wouldn't be able to steal things like handsaws and bicycle pumps, as pictured in one of the last chapter's illustrations, but these birds have at least some resemblance to their real-world counterparts.

Oh, and a group of jackdaws is called "a clattering," or sometimes "a train."

One does wonder why the (brief) long faces over the fate of the Scarecrow. I mean, he's been unstuffed a whole bunch of times! I even had to create the "troubling existential questions" tag for him! Even if they didn't have the convenient pile of money to stuff him with, surely they could have just bundled up his clothes and head and stuffed him when they got back to Oz, right?

Okay, so we get back to Oz here. Now, let's get geographically nerdy! It's assumed that when they overshot the Oz border they ended up in Dorothy's "outside world" -- i.e., our world. We meet a clattering of jackdaws, which live throughout Europe and western Asia, and a couple of spots in northern Africa. Now, to get back to Oz from there, they cross over the great sandy desert that separates Oz from the rest of the world, without crossing over any water or anything. So, we're talking about Oz existing within some sandy desert in Europe or western Asia. It would probably be easiest to say that it's in the Gobi Desert because of its size (magic, of course, protects Oz from the extreme temperature variation of the region.) However, the jackdaws have stashed away a whole bunch of money clearly identified as "dollars" -- though how an Oz-born kid knows what a "dollar" is is another matter -- which of course implies we're somewhere in the US, nowhere near where any jackdaws live. And of course, a tornado and a balloon would have a heck of a way to go to bring people form the American Midwest to central Asia like that. So where were they, really? THIS MAKES NO SENSE, BAUM.

(Though of course, it's probable that they were just mistaken about being in the outside world, and were simply in another part of Nonestica.)

Both General Jinjur's Army of Revolt and Glinda's all-girl army are a little more evidence of Baum writing this book for the stage, as even book reviews of the time noted that they were clearly intended to showcase large groups of chorus girls. Whatever, they're still badass.

Though... this here would be Glinda's officer in charge of fudge? Is that right? I mean, I know you want an army to be well-supplied, and I personally would want fudge before going into battle, but... what?

Okay, Jack, you're... you're being rather terrifying here. Please get out of Jellia's personal space.

Okay, only one more installment to go! Will they find out what happened to the Princess Ozma? Will Jinjur be deposed? Will Jack's head spoil? Find out next time!


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg with no pictures, and a fully illustrated facsimile of the first edition can be found at Open Library. No reading ahead, though!