Gentlemen, thank you very much for coming to this wonderful event as part of the F.T. weekend from the weekend of the Literary Festival.
This is a real gem and a proper highlight because you get to see the actual manuscript with Mary Shelley's writing and post-show.
These guys made their about the margins but things like Black Sheep previously noted.
We have three experts for you today. We have Richard Overton, who is Motley's librarian, the 25th, only the 25th since 1599, the very ancient post.
And we have Maureen, who is Mary Shelley's biographer, and the biography has been reissued for the bicentenary of her birth.
But that's very good. And The New York Times called it affectionate, and the Independent called it brilliant and enthralling.
And Sophie is no less than any of those things today. And we also have Stephen Harper,
who's on the staff of the special collections of both the library and who'll be hopefully manipulating some of the material evidence.
And he's the author of this, which is available in the Baldwin Library Bookshop.
And I should also say, if you would like to buy Miranda's books afterwards,
if you go downstairs to the seated area, the white sofa area will look quite like 70,000.
So that makes it sound like the by the big screen, you'll be able to purchase some of them and maybe even have inside.
Very easily done. Well, thank you very much for coming. And please welcome the guests.
So, gentlemen, thank you very much indeed for coming to the library.
We have on the screen a poster for Frankenstein.
It's obviously a book which was originally published on the 1st of January 2018.
So it's one of the focus focuses for our event today is to be celebrating commemorate the bicentenary of its publication,
but also to mark how it's become so pervasive in our culture.
And that's partly because of all the film adaptations.
I think it's hard to find a novel which has had more cinematic and TV adaptations than Frankenstein,
and it's of course become a what's the phrase loan word or something.
You know, you see it attributed to all sorts of concoctions of financial or information technology.
If something is not being done well, it's described as a Frankenstein of a policy or you get the you get the drift.
So we're going to take our story back to the origins of this great work,
this highly influential work, and to retrace the mind and the actions of the author,
Mary Shelley, and the various collaborators who she worked with in order to create this astonishing piece of art and culture.
And we're going to begin with the first of three manuscript notebooks.
And we're we're going to actually look at four notebooks today and four printed books.
And three of the notebooks are the manuscripts of Frankenstein.
And this is a photograph of what the first of these notebooks looks like.
And we call it Notebook A. It's also known as the Geneva Notebook.
Now, when it came to us in the 1970s, it was just a stack, a pile of loose sheets of paper.
And what my colleagues have done is sort of reassemble it as if it was just torn out of its original binding.
So we're going back to to 1816.
So this is the second European trip that Percy and Mary and her boyfriend still Percy Shelley took.
And I'm going to ask Miranda to tell the story in a second of the famous evening spent in Geneva.
But this notebook was purchased in a Genevan Stationers shop, and it contains, if you look carefully at the paper,
it's watermarked with the watermark of a genevan paper maker called Devil Devote Liberal,
whose mill was active just 20 kilometres on the French side, just outside of Geneva.
And so we've got to think ourselves back to Mary Shelley going and buying this notebook.
We'll have a look at it in a little bit more detail in a second.
But as it survives to us in the Bodley, and it's just a stack of individual sheets, and that's what came to us in the 1970s.
But it was originally bound. And you can see these saw marks in the paper for where the buying, the original binding had stitching,
which kept the sheets together in probably a leather, a limp leather cover, which is now at some point torn off.
We don't know exactly when, but that's kind of what it looks like of all the bits of paper are assembled.
But what we have done is to carefully put them into guard, which we call forensic rules,
so that you can properly handle without damaging the originals.
Let's go back, Miranda, to the second trip of Percy and Mary.
And they arrive in Geneva. And where do they go?
Well, this is one of these difficult ones where I think when should I stop, say, neurotically at my watch?
Because I could I could take over and go on for 40 minutes, but I promise not to about five.
They went from the hotel which they'd arrived in on.
They'd come with Clare Clairmont, who was Mary's stepsister, who was in hot pursuit of Lord Byron,
and they all knew that Lord Byron was coming out of Geneva. So that was the object of the exercise.
And in fact they arrived in such a hurry, they got there ahead of him, and Byron turned up a little later.
And because he was always extremely shy and he intensely disliked in the year that he'd sensationally been left by his wife,
the being the object of interest in the hotel. So he took a wonderful, very grand house that was called Villa Diodati,
which I think Milton stayed in years before, but it was a very grand house looking across.
They could actually still see him from the hotel,
and the rather enterprising hotel owner put up telescopes on on the terraces and charged people to have a good look.
And they'd say, We can see his sheets or we can see the ladies going in and out.
And they got very imaginative, Shelley and Claire and Mary and little was it Little William or Little Clara at this point,
until William moved into a much smaller house nearby, sort of in the shadow of the Villa Diodati.
And because this was famously the summer of darkness, and their little house was very, very small and dark.
And also it was far more exciting to be near a low bar. And I would imagine they spent most of their time up at the villa.
And we have to imagine, as all the film makers have done in the summer of Darkness, mostly they had the shutters closed,
but at 4:00 in the afternoon they would need to have the shutters closed and the candles lit because there was no light.
Byron wrote an extraordinary poem called Darkness, which I think inspired Mary Shelley's last man.
It's an imagining of the end of the world and this kind of terrible blankness and ice and desolation.
And they were all both frightened and elated by the feeling that was conjured up by the atmosphere and so on.
The famous night, as retold by both Doctor Polidori, who was Byron's physician,
would come out with him and he was keeping a diary for John Murray Barnes and anything about it.
He was keeping notes on everything Byron was doing and also by who else was keeping notes there.
Anybody at that point named Mary was.
But we've lost her, John I think I can't remember when her journal tons of picks up again but a bit later on so we haven't got a very,
very clear account. We've got Mary's wonderful 1831 account of 1816.
We'll look at that and we'll look at that later.
But as far as we know, what happened was they set to work to rev their feelings up, to get excited to a certain point.
Do you want me to carry on or to stop that carry on? Okay.
Sorry. As you see what I mean, I kind of rather carry on. So they did things like they read out ghost stories.
And Byron, who had been very thrilled by Coleridge's Kublai Khan and Pains of Sleep and Cristobal,
which were published with some money from Byron getting into the production and the little copy of that to just come out to Geneva.
So Byron, I think, read aloud from Cristobal a particularly sensational passage in which there's a terrifying dream,
and Cristobal is the kind of spooky figure appears and looks pretty creepy indeed.
And Shelley, who I think we all assume had been into Dr. Polidori, his chest of medications and got her visa,
got violently excited and started screaming and saying that he could see that Mary where her nipples were, instead her eyes that were staring at him.
So you can see it was an atmosphere of massive over excitement.
And in this atmosphere, Byron suggested that they should.
All right. Ghost stories. This is why I must keep away from 1831, because we get confused.
Anyway, they were all going to write stories. Yes. And so Mary does write a story.
And we don't exactly know when she decided to write it down.
So she conjures it up and they read it aloud. But she goes out some days later and buys this notebook in a genevan station shop.
So why don't we actually look at what this notebook does and we're going to turn first.
So this is notebook. This is the first the earliest surviving draft of Frankenstein.
And you can see it's on this blue paper.
It doesn't quite come out on the screen, but we're going to lay them out so you can look at the end, at the documents themselves.
And I think and so this, of course, has been torn out of its original binding.
So please imagine this in a blank book bought from the station.
And Mary has ruled the paper. So she's ruled it, presumably so that it can be annotated,
so that corrective corrections or suggestions for altering the text can be made in the margin.
And it's also got a chapter heading at the start.
So again, you can assume that Mary in her mind was thinking this is going to end up as a publication
or that she is kind of self-publishing here in manuscript form and numbering the pages.
Numbering the pages. That could have happened later, presumably, but I don't think the chapter headings,
the chapter paintings are obviously kind of set out from the start.
But you're right, she could have number them as she going along or it could have happened at the end.
But you can see that this hand is the hand of Mary Shelley.
And so the bulk of the text is written out by her.
And then Percy has come along and made amend options here, which she clearly wanted.
I think we were talking about this before, and it's a subject of endless fascination to anybody.
Looking at Frankenstein is how this collaboration worked, because back in the seventies, when there was all that sort of thing,
that the kind of everything men did was bad, let's put it loosely like that, and everything women did was good.
So at that point, Percy Shelley was very, very bad, and everything he did to this book was destructive and ornate,
and that really it should have just been left as Mary wrote it.
But what we can see here from these margins is that Mary was inviting him to comments, and there are actually clear signs of,
some would say, of them actually even sitting in bed together, amending it and passing the pages across the bed.
Although that was put by Percy at one point saying, Oh, my pretty pixie, the word is, Oh, come on for that lady.
Yes, we did that. Quite how they did. Yes. But what we do know.
So if you just look here, you can see Percy making.
We're going to zoom in. Good. And here you can see Percy writing on.
Now he's doing this at a pace because if we turn the page of the to the previous leaf in sequence,
you can see at the bottom that those mendacious is in Percy's hand of Blotted.
So he's written them too fast. He hasn't. He's too impatient to allow the ink to dry and he's shot the notebook.
And so the the ink is blotted on the, the, the previous sheet of paper that's kind of come down sort of upon it.
So you can see that there's a kind of you talk about the fever of the the night where the ideas were generated.
But there's a certain sort of impatience in the collection of the text.
But why don't we go why don't we move on to a book?
Actually, before we do that, can we go to Page Folio 24?
Um, you know, let's, I'm just going to, let's.
Later. So here we just kind of ask you to bear these little calculations in mind.
So these are very careful page counts.
So just bear that in mind because they're trying to work out the the pagination,
how the story will be laid out when it eventually comes to a publication.
And when you see they mean Mary, Mary and Percy together, we assume.
Yeah. Okay. So moving swiftly on to Folio 24.
I'm sorry. Sorry. I was just saying, I'm always amazed when I look at this,
seeing how clear her handwriting is and how rapidly she was writing with such confidence that it's extraordinary.
Okay. So we're going to cut to the inch the key action in the novel.
So chapter the seventh, it was on a dreary night of November five, I beheld my man completed with an anxiety that almost amounted to agony.
I collected instruments of life around me that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.
It was already one in the morning. The rain patted dismally against the window and my candle was nearly burnt out when,
by the glimmer of the half thick, half extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open.
It breathed hard and the convulsive motion agitated its limbs.
And there. That's exactly how she wrote it with just a few little suggestions by Percy of that text.
But she had clearly, you know, the kind of the pacing of that opening paragraph of Chapter seven is just extraordinary.
I mean, this kind of very evocative, almost cinematic.
But that does fit, of course, with I know it is jumping ahead 1831 to the green,
which is when she described the dream in which the creature first appeared to her in Frankenstein.
But when you actually see this and see the clarity and speed and certainty with which it set out,
it does seem to bear out the idea that she really had this image in her mind.
It's so unusual to see something that has this immediacy.
It does beg the question, was there an earlier draft? Were there much sketchier?
Was there another notebook or sheets of paper that were much sketchier and which
are lost and that they were then sort of worked out and laid out on in this note?
But we just don't know because it seems almost incredible that it wasn't.
I mean, it's such confidence. Yeah, but again, you can see Percy here, so he's right.
So here's something. Miranda, what do you think is going on here? So Mary writes handsome and I think she she blots her inkblots.
You just see here. Then she rewrites and so on.
And then this is crossed out by Percy, who writes Beautiful instead.
But there's handsome in the margin in Mary's hand, again and again.
Beautiful. So is she getting fed up with him saying, no, no, no, no, it's not beautiful.
It's handsome. I've already written this. But then she she does she give in to beautiful finally.
Well, we know that she does give in because there in the finished text is the word beautiful.
And I think it was on Mellor, who is one of the best commenters on on this collaboration.
She says that Shelley shows elsewhere that he has an absolute hatred of the word handsome, so he just wanted it to be beautiful, you know.
But it does actually raise a very frivolous point. I was having great fun with my granddaughters this morning.
I said I was coming off to Oxford to talk about Frankenstein, like all other little girls about Frankenstein.
And I said, Now you tell me what you think about somebody,
a creator who went out of his way to assemble all these pieces of a body together to make perhaps his own son,
and then chose to make him eight foot tall. And why would you make your creature eight foot tall?
And they thought, first of all, it was they would be better at gobbling up sweets.
And also because he would be able to go about and I think this is rather plausible that Frankenstein would be able to point and say,
look, this is my creation, because actually, if he'd just created somebody of our height, who would ever believe him that.
But anyway, beautiful and handsome, as we will know, he was not.
Yes, yes, indeed, indeed. And there. But there are sort of saying.
He's he's yellow skinned is improved I think from done.
But was this necessary to insert his his hair was flowing but his hair of a lustrous black was flowing is you know,
I think there was a curious detail, but with debates about whether he's over embellishing.
Well I think that that's what does come through in and Melas but what she is rather critical of Percy and she says
that his language is very flowery that he's actually imposing a poetic language on Mary's much more direct language.
And I think the can be said something for that but the other pieces were he actually
clarifies what she says and she talks about the workshop in which the creature is created,
which sounds like a coffin shop, and he changes that to laboratory, which makes a lot more sense of what he does is an improvement.
But Percy's hand is very much a black ink, and Mary's is this slightly, slightly lighter ink.
I do you think that was deliberate so that they could actually work out which the commendations were false?
I don't know if that doesn't sound. I don't think so.
It certainly is very lazy about something that is not sorry that he was very lazy about sharpening this with this pattern.
So this is writing tends to be happening because of.
Okay. Let's move on. And we're going to kind of fast forward from 1816, from the summer of 1816 to September.
So they returned to Britain on the 18th of September, 1816.
And how old is how old are they at this point? I'm always terrible at this one.
You do. It's so many is 18 right by that and Percy is 23.
23 very, very young. Anyway, extraordinary to think of herself, Mary, with an idea that she is going to publish herself.
So you think of that Geneva notebook with the chapter headings laid out with this kind of sense that they're going to publish.
Although she always said that my husband was always inciting me to obtain literary respect, she put it on to Percy.
It wasn't her, it was him. Whether we believe that or not, I'm not sure.
So they were trying to buy off the rent a property in bath and in bath.
Mary goes into another station, a shop buys another notebook.
Perhaps we should this. And Claire Clement gives birth to a child and produces the little baby that might have been barren.
So I always rather mischievously think might have been Shelley's it looked remarkably like Shelley.
So here's the stack of again, loose sheets that came to us in the 1970s on deposit, which again,
my colleagues have kind of stuck together as if it had just been torn out of the original notebook.
And I think perhaps on the next sheet, Stephen, you can see the other side of the paper because it's quite easy to see.
Perhaps here you can just faintly get the sense that the ends of the pages were marbles.
So this was a blank notebook which had marbled edges of the paper.
When it was closed, it had this marble marbled decoration which is being recorded as quite an expensive little notebook.
We also saw something special, a large paper out. So these are more kind of cheap things because we don't have the findings.
So that's often a good indication of whether binding.
We think probably a little clever binding because that would tell us something of her regard for her work.
I suppose the kind of note when she wanted a large paper to get the novel.
But this paper is Watermark 1806, so it had been in the station shop for ten years,
which might support the idea that it was quite an expensive notebook.
So yes, the cheap stocks of paper would be sold much more quickly if the stations did not want to hold expensive stock for for long periods of time.
So opinions is fairly low, but it is a cream coloured paper rather than the blue paper of the Geneva.
And pages from this notebook were torn out by Percy Shelley to write, to use as the manuscript of his speculations on morals and metaphysics.
So we also have that manuscript here involved in that.
It's torn out of this notebook. So to write that one, which rather undercuts what I was saying,
because if it was such a special book, would he have been allowed to do that by Mary Snow?
Yes. Who knows? Who knows? So but what we can say.
Let's go back. Stephen, sorry for mocking you about.
So we came back to the this is the bath notebook.
This is on the cream coloured paper and you can see this on that.
She hasn't ruled it in exactly the same way as some of the pages,
didn't have wide margins to allow for that kind of collaborative annotation that we've seen before.
But we can see Pelosi still manipulating the sheets here, but very few of the same book has generally fewer annotations.
But this is where she's got into the observed, I think with the is, isn't it?
Which is where I might be. I can't see quite what we've got.
So he's just moving out of London here.
So and this is a passage which it does not appear in the printed text, the published text which covers a visit by Victor Frankenstein to us.
I, so I thought this might be fun to read some of this or not like this and try to because it's quite dense to work know.
I think this is a slightly kind of faster hand here.
I think I get the sense that she's going to be more quoted in the first one.
But from thence we proceeded to Oxford.
We were charmed with the appearance of the town. The colleges are ancient and picturesque.
The. Streets, the streets broad and the landscape.
Redmond. Redmond is perfect until it's perfect by the lovely places which spreads into broad, broad and.
Plus Paramount, plus the glasses.
I think you know this one by heart. SIP of water and run the south of the town.
We cans of lettuce to several of the professors who received us with great politeness and cordiality.
We found that the regulations of this university were much improved since the days of giving them.
But there is still infraction. A great deal of bigotry and devotion to established rules that.
Constrain the minds of the students and lead to slavish and narrow principles and discuss what we should sit with.
We should discuss it. Well, not really, but just wonder about it in the context of things.
Yes, many, many enormities were also practised, which,
although they might excite the laughter of a stranger well looked upon in the world of this of the University as matters of utmost consequence.
Some of the gentlemen, this is a very interesting passage or neatly wore light coloured pantaloons when it was the rule of the college to wear dark.
The masters were angry. And there.
Stephen, help me out. I'm bit stumped. Something resolute as.
That during our stay, two of the students were on the point of being expelled.
This very question, on this very question, the this something severity caused a considerable change in the costume of the gentlemen for several days.
So they obviously changed the colour it. Now of course two students who were disobeying their superiors perhaps is a reference back to Percy
and the Thomas Jefferson for his friend who were undergraduates in University College Oxford,
just a few yards from where we're sitting and were indeed expelled in the second term of
their first year at the university for disobeying the authorities by publishing works,
which were not considered appropriate for their status.
The key one being on the necessity of ageism.
So why do we think it's come into Frankenstein is the thing that slightly puzzles me.
We know that Shelley and Mary went on this river trip up and visited Oxford.
We know Shelley's Oxford connection, but in the actual story of Frankenstein, there's really no need for him to go to Oxford at all.
And I actually I'm just I'm not asking this in a clever way where I would say, Oh, hi, Beyonce.
I would love to know what the answer is. Why is it here at all?
It's fascinating. But why? I think there's something about Oxford for Percy.
There's I don't know, perhaps this is more him or she detects in him a sort of a sense of regret for
not having completed his degree or a sense of regret for having left early.
And so people sort of to some extent this is on the front cover of Stephen's book is a picture of the show In Memoriam at University College.
I encourage any of you to go and see if you haven't this extraordinary structure.
So in the 1890s, Shelley's granddaughter, Graham's daughter, daughter in law Shelley.
So daughter in law, that sort of piece, some gesture back to the university by funding this extraordinary statue.
Not for the faint hearted, extraordinary. It's a very good word for it.
There is no other. And she gave to the book the my predecessor, the Poetical Notebooks.
So there is a sense of wanting to sort of, you know, rejoin the name Shelley and Oxford and say, this is Mary, I'm Spirit.
Yes. Well, it would fit with the idea. That strikes me very much that the Shelley's marriage was a very up and down one emotionally.
There were many very difficult moments, partly because Shelley did have an eye for the ladies.
And during this particular period when Frankenstein was being written, of course, Claire,
who was a very large part of the problem, was completely preoccupied by Lord Byron.
And I would think that that would mean that Shelley and Mary were most unusually close at this point,
which sort of heightens the whole idea of the collaborative attempt.
And Mary actually wanting to do something nice for her husband.
Yes, why not? Yeah. Okay.
Well, why don't we move now? Let me. This one.
Yeah. To the notebook.
c0c here's the here's the Shell Memorial.
Irresistable in university college.
It's massive scale. So this is almost life size.
You've got to go and see. It is quite extraordinary. Let's go to Notebook C.
So the you've seen the two notebooks, which are the drafts, you've seen the conversation between Percy and Mary.
And now what happens a little later on is we find a fan copy manuscript, which is actually written into a small, smaller sized notebook.
It actually had 11 parts, and we only have one of them that survives.
This one here, we call it Notebook C, and you can see here that it becomes the printer's copy.
So you can see it says volume three, page one, two, six.
Is that. Yeah. So this is the manuscript that Percy takes around the London publishers seeking a publisher for it.
And I was asking you earlier on what? Why we've only got this one surviving copy.
And Richard was explaining that, of course, it was just the printers copies, so they would have had no particular reason to place a value on them.
Yeah, that's yeah, absolutely. So. But the first stage for these copies is to get a publisher.
And he puts it in the hands of a number of the more famous publishers, including John Murray, who's buying his publisher.
And John John Murray, the first said, no, thank you, not for us.
And he eventually finds a publisher, James, like you, tell you to take, you know,
who's quite a small publisher, I think was more so small compared to Morris, but also bookseller.
Hmm. And if we go to Folio 24 with notebook, see, we can see the process of making this kind of copy in action.
Because here we have Mary's familiar hand, which stops and Percy takes over the labour of copying from the drafts of the,
the kind of final text which they're happy with that actually gets published in the end.
So that's a very good that's wonderful to see with the change the change of.
And this. This paper is watermarked 1809 by another English paper mill, Phipps.
And again, it is obviously hung around in the station shop for some time.
But let's go back now to this one from.
Here. And we'll move to another note with the final note.
We're going to look in this session, which is Mary Shelley's Journal.
This to me was the most exciting. I say throw before you came in being allowed to hold this journal the first time I've ever done it.
It's so if we just showed the outside with fancy and perhaps so you can see that this is a leather bound.
We're talking about the findings of the journals earlier. This is one that's bound in leather.
It was brought in and at the same time they were in Geneva.
She brought this notebook and it was a blank book.
But this time the binding has survived. It's a leather binding with gold tooling.
And if we just look at the spine, you can see probably this is, again,
a kind of reasonably friendly, you know, well, you know, this would have been relatively expensive.
It would have come rent bound.
And this is an extraordinary for it's one of I think there are six or seven volumes of Mary Shelley's Journal on this case.
From which date to which date? This particular one. I don't remember.
We'll see. We'll see. Folio nine of rape two.
And this says yes, here we are on July 21st, 1816.
And this is a very, very poignant note here indeed with my happiness, June the seventh, 18, 19, though she does not mean it ended and I was happy.
It means my happiness ended and so did the Journal at the same time.
And that's for a particular reason which Richard and Stephen were just showing me, which is that when you turn to the end of the journal,
it's where Little William, who is a little baby boy who was out with them at Geneva, is in Rome with them.
And he caught malaria, I think, and died.
And there's the most heartbreaking entry, very similar to the one Mary made about her first little baby.
She lost I think she lost five children in all. But that's yeah.
William is very ill. But. What's it say?
Got that evening when Miss Curran Secord.
I'm in Friday the fourth is it. And then just this poignant blank.
And it broke his mother's heart. How could it not? He was a sweet little boy.
And one of the great curiosities,
among the million curiosities of Frankenstein is why she chose to call Frankenstein's little brother who is murdered by the creature, William.
How strange that she is with her own little William. And yet the little boy who she chooses to murder is called William.
I don't have an answer. Let's move to.
We can kind of go back, actually was we'll go to 30, 41 first, though, next, which is quite an interesting a passage here down the bottom.
So she details in quite a lot of this, a Friday, the 13th of December, Saturday the 14th.
Right. Read the lock to send it to Chesterfield.
So lots of details on what they were reading and doing. And then Monday, the 16th of December, have admitted writing my journal for some time.
Shelley goes to London and returns. I'm with him.
I was with him. Spend the time between the hands and the Godwin's a marriage takes place.
So she went to his position. And that is because what has happened is that all the time that Mary has been with Shelley,
there was a wife in place and two small children around Feehan Charles.
And when Shelley and Mary first runaway together in 1814, Shelley,
who was in some ways, if you don't mind me saying so, slightly off with the fairies,
actually got a letter to his wife in England saying it would be wonderful if you
could come and join this small Swiss commune where you will learn from Mary as I do.
We can all learn from Mary. And not surprisingly, Harriet didn't reply.
And in the autumn of 18 or 1862, tragedies happened.
Mary's half sister, Fanny Emily, died on.
She had committed suicide in a pub in Swansea.
And it was she wrote a little note to her, her stepfather Godwin, saying that she felt that she was a burden on the family and would take her life.
And Harriet had been found, drowned and pregnant in the Serpentine.
And it's never been clear who the father was.
Shelley, of course, produced some great story of it was, I can't remember some military man.
It didn't ring very true. I, I would question who the father might be myself.
But of course, what it did do was open the way for Shelley at last to marry Mary.
So the marriage took place for the.
I also just noticed here a marriage takes place read Lord Chesterfield and Locke said well most people do trust married.
So let's move to full year 49 because here is the real reason for sharing Mary's Journal because April the 10th, 1817.
Correct. So this is evening on a sequence of days where the manuscript is correct.
And so I think is this some of the the notebooks, A and B with those annotations by Percy?
Very possibly. But we see again Friday the 11th, correct.
EF Correct. EF Correct.
EF Correct. And is this where we first see the F being used?
It's first got the name Frankenstein on this page. Yep.
And then the corrections go on until the 13th of May, almost, or the 18th of April.
Let's find the 18th of April. Transcribe after dinner, walk a little.
So the transcription. So this is the process of copying from the fair copies from the drafts to the French copy.
And by this time they've moved to Marlow. They're living near the Thames in a rather charming house that they've done up a bit.
And Clare is there again with them, I think,
and Shelley and the children and also a little girl who shall it shows always adopting little girls to little mama.
At this point, they're all so distraught by the poverty they see because one thing, it's not really inappropriate.
Part of the discussion. But of course, 1816 is just after Waterloo and all the years of the Napoleonic Wars.
And one of the things that most affect Shelley when he is at Marlow, is the spectacle of terrible poverty,
whole families standing weeping by the roadside because they haven't got anything to eat.
So it's a rather haunting time. And perhaps that, too, finds its way into the story.
So if we move to full year 51, the risk to. We can see on the 13th of May.
Uh, we're done here. Finish transcribing.
Wonderful. She basically takes a month.
You can see transcribed transcribed transcribed, transcribed, transcribed all day work after t read Pliny She never stops Mary.
You know, she's extraordinary. And she's the most scholarly woman.
Extraordinary. Amazing. So I think what we should do now is move to the printed texts.
So this is the end of our sequence of looking at the notebooks.
And we're going to begin now and we're going to go to the 1st of January 2018.
So the point of our. Being here is to celebrate and commemorate the the publication of Frankenstein 200 years ago.
And you can see that the book was originally published in three volumes.
So this is the great Victorian habit.
All the best books are published. We call them three decades now.
So three volume publications published, some famously, and this one has been rather handsomely bound up later in the 19th century.
So it didn't look like this when it was published. And I am ashamed to say that my predecessor in 1880, and that's probably his librarian,
although he was he was entitled to a free copy of this straight from the publishers as a library of legal deposit under the
copyright to Queen Anne refused to take it because it was another book with a great library like the body one trashed like this.
Well, particularly Frankenstein, of course,
which was regarded as so scandalous that I think even in the 1970s there was a vicar in Chester Square whose house they were going to put a plaque on.
And it was going to say, Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein and the Vicar at Sea, refused to have the terrible word Frankenstein on his house.
So maybe the Bodleian felt the same way. So the key thing to know, expand this so we can see it printed in London.
It's published in London is printed for Lexington Hughes, Harding, May and Jones in Finsbury Square in 1818.
And the title is Frankenstein of the Modern Prometheus.
Conceit tells us that it's published in three volumes, the little quote from Milton here.
So that's interesting. I've forgotten that.
I hope I'm right about that. So I'm fairly interested,
fairly sure we can check it out as we know Google and find your on the title page is that Mary Shelley's name does
not appear you know so which is why Scott great and praised Percy which annoyed how great the internet park is.
If you remember from the fair copy Percy had gone around,
the publishers keep putting it in their hands and he was quite ambiguous, I think, about who the publisher was.
And so I think did he want them to think it was him because they might be more likely to publish it rather than Mary,
who was, you know, not known as an author.
But there is a nice letter from Shelley to Lachlan to the publisher.
I want to mention that the the novel which I sent him is not my own production, but that of a friend.
You know, being present in England cannot make the corrections we suggest as to any me inaccuracies, inaccuracies of language.
I should feel myself authorised to to amend them when reading proofs.
So I wonder if the person abroad he's kind of into.
Maggie Byron Interesting. Interesting.
He could have been would you think? Stephen I honestly don't know.
I just think he was being, you know, distancing himself from the novel.
So no one thought it was him? I think so, yeah. Yeah.
So here's the first here's the first edition.
I've had the privilege of seeing a copy of this which was signed to Byron from the author.
Oh, that one. I saw that one too. It was so exciting that was discovered and so did Peter Harrington's, I think.
And only the first volume emerged, didn't it? Yeah.
So let's go on now to the second edition.
It does just pause for a moment on what you just said.
It does show how proud Mary was of this production that she wanted to send a copy of,
making it extremely clear that it was her who had written it to Lord Byron.
Yes, it says everything about her delight in her work.
So by the time we get to 1923, we have the second edition and this is attributed to Mary.
So this is the first time that her name becomes associated with the world.
And Shelley is not dead. Shelley is in it.
So whether that affects the fact that her name suddenly appear, I don't know why they suddenly felt it was all right for her name to appear.
I think that so much kind of correspondence perhaps between the circle of Shelley, all those right, Byron and so on.
Home in Italy, her name becomes more widely associated with.
Yes, yes. Not just her name, but her mother's name because it's Mary Wills to.
Good point. Exactly. Exactly. So let's now skip so you can see also let's just go back to the time page in two volumes.
So this slightly cheaper production, we changed publishers.
So Lexington sold the copyright to Whitaker, and it's republished in two volumes,
which can be more easily found together and a slightly cheaper production to pay for his own cheat sheet of the the first edition.
And then that's moved to the third edition. Um, so in 1831, a third printing comes out.
We actually have a slight eternity copy. You got the famous picture at the front.
It is the first piece illustrated. So. And this is a very becomes a very famous illustration.
We can think back to that discussion about handsome abuse for when we look at the creature.
Yes, indeed. So this addition is particularly important because of the introduction.
We just pause at the top of the page just for a moment. Um, so it's just not me.
The interesting times you saw with her, she's published other, other, other books,
which I think also didn't carry her name because the Shelley family,
by then it said, Your name takes the sacred name of Shelley, so she could only be by the author of Frankenstein.
Okay, there. You're a snobby lot, but there is an introduction which is the first account by her of that famous evening on the banks of Lake Geneva.
And she talks here about being a daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity.
So Mary Wollstonecraft and we Godwin, she returned the page.
Stephen, perhaps.
Yes. In the summer of 1860 we visited Switzerland and became the neighbours of Lord Byron.
It proved a wet, congenial summer and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house.
Some volumes of ghost stories translated from the German and French fell into our hands.
And then. Yes.
Turn over. Yeah.
Yes. Nightwing on this talk and even the witching hour going by before you retire to rest.
When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep.
Nor could I be sad to think. So this idea of the waking dream, to quote, keeps my imagination unbidden, possessed and guided me,
gifting the successive images that arise in my mind with a vividness far beyond
the usual bounds of reverie I saw with eyes shut for acute mental vision,
I saw the pale students of how they dance, kneeling beside the figure and put together.
So she's sort of conjuring the myth. She's sort of curating her own myth and the myth of the creation of the novel here.
To some extent, I think you see that in the rest of the archive with the documents which the family herself and her descendants gather together,
including, you know, multiple books of everything. We've got more have almost pieces of paper in the in the show.
So what you said about adding being an earlier manuscript, if you look here on the morrow, I announced that I had thought of the story.
I began that day with the words it was on on a dreary night in November making and a
transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream of that transcript hasn't started.
Hmm. Yeah. So that. That there was some earlier which would help explain what we were discussing earlier about the extraordinary,
eerie fluency with which she actually produced that late passage.
She'd been over it already, so I can't remember.
Is it actually signed by Mary the introduction and the US, Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley.
So but I think the interesting thing is to go back to 1823 with the second edition is that she comes back and she says she comes back in the summer.
I think she comes back in August. She says, I found myself a celebrity.
She's citing power in this. And she lo. I find my work and find myself famous.
Right. And she's citing her. Well, excellent. But the reason why she's so inspiring in that way is because her novel,
published in 1880 and the subsequent three years, has been adapted for the stage.
And assumption is adapted in a version called presumption.
So and this is the play you build the poster for the first performance of the play on the Monday,
July the 2018 23 will be produced for the first time an entirely new romance of a peculiar,
peculiar interest entitled Presumption or the Fate of Frankenstein.
And it's performed at the face of all the English Opera House on the Strand in London.
And you can see that Victor Frankenstein is played by Mr. Wallace.
There are various other characters, but here the monster of the creature.
So horrific that you. The score I give the name to it is just a series of dots.
They were tremendous on doing the promotion for this.
They had people marching through the streets with placards saying, Danger to your life and your wits.
If you go and see this terrifying production, stay away from it.
So of course, the crowds flocked in and that was such a success that when Mary wrote her
introduction in 1831 and it was the first time she'd actually got some money,
I think for Frankenstein, she'd been paid £30 by Bentley's, and she put the word presumption in very deliberately into her introduction.
And this kind of referencing this, because it was such a famous production,
it toured all over the country and you could go to any bar for new or anywhere and see presumption was a much bigger hit them Frankenstein.
So but what at this point has a number of the play goes for the early performances
and we'll just we'll just turn the pages just then you get a sense of these posters.
So that's the first production, and then we have the second time,
always with other different plays going on with this little place where Charlene dined and love them on the roses.
And then the third time is performed, goes along as fine, free and easy.
And then the fourth time we have a Roman for an Oliver and the rival soldiers.
And the fifth performance with Gretna Green.
And where shall I dine? It's coming up at lunchtime.
So it's interesting to note we started this session with the poster of one of the early films, the famous Boris Karloff performance of Frankenstein,
and the sense of it being a dramatic of this novel, having a dramatic life outside of the text itself.
But that actually begins very, very early on in its history, back in the 1923.
So I think perhaps as it is now, 5 to 1, we should probably pause will lay these things out,
but particularly invites some questions from you at this point.
The changed and the difference in the second and third edition on.
I don't think not. Not significantly.
I'm just I think. Not at all, actually.
I think the text itself wasn't changed at the end of the introduction of after the first production was not right or.
Didn't. Instruments after after 1831?
Yes. I don't know. Not nothing very significant.
But it was really the introduction that just shed a whole new light opponent.
And I get the feeling that, you know, perhaps if she did, sorry she did.
You're quite right. She introduced the implication of governance ism into the 1831 edition.
You know, the idea of how the creature was animated and jolted into life.
And that appears for the first time in 1831. So.
I mean. Yes, I do. Sorry.
Can't hear. Why was it called resumption? Oh. Oh, that's an easy one to answer.
That's because the subtext that we saw on the front pages did I ask the creator whatever it is that I asked to be turned into a man from Clay,
the Promethean thing and the whole idea of the Promethean myth is presumption.
So that's what is playing with. This is the scrutiny that witness I'm sorry.
The description presumptions do exist. I do not in the program that the of it.
Yes. I'm not sure. I don't know the answer to that. We certainly have, as you can see, plenty of plenty of evidence.
But it struck me as safety, which is incredibly rare.
Dramatisations of the story. Hmm.
It sounds as though it may be more painful. Right?
Yeah. Of course.
Yeah. Tex come to the borderline.
Did it actually get the manuscript manuscripts just passed down through it?
Yes, they do. So there are various branches of the families out there.
Yeah. So Lady Friend in 1991 gives us the first tranche of the Shelly's notebooks,
a letter from the boys, and then another descended from Shelley Rose in the 1940.
Gives this other name and then the other side of the family, Mary's side.
The manuscripts were collected in a place called Boscombe House in Nepal within Dorset.
And this becomes a come and the shrine, I suppose, and, uh, the, the, the line.
Now I'm going to lose track of the immediate descendants romance.
And there's an adoption marriage to the Scarlet family.
Yes, they have Mary Shelley's son. I'm sorry, Percy and Mary Shelley some further.
He was married to Jacob.
They have an adopted daughter called Bessie. And Bessie married Scarlett, who later became a Black Avenger.
And then it passed down through the world, Avengers.
And then in in the 1970s, think all that interested in politics and in the both of them so that scholars used them.
And then in 2004 of 2000 to the AFL died and the ninth story that a parent died and the ninth family,
Ebinger decides to sell the manuscripts and gives us first refusal.
So that was my first job here in Morgan, which was to raise the money for the amateur papers,
which has the Frankenstein manuscripts that hope that the most important things we would say included the joint journals of Percy and Mary,
like the one that we've seen this morning, and then thousands of other drafts and particularly correspondence.
Is this actually larger talk just on the History Frankenstein manuscript?
If we go back to early 2019, Mary Shelley had to leave England in a hurry because that was the that.
And they gave a whole lot of things behind, including probably the manuscript of Frankenstein.
So it left the family and then it was pulled back by the family in the late 19th century.
Well, from someone coincidentally we got a picture, so it was between 1818.
And then finally the fact that it would have got removed from the. And do we knew anything of the history before that Godwin got it at all,
what had happened during the 19th century like organised accounts at the time.
So he never paid his bills.
And they talk about his landlord, his mother landlord withheld a group of papers and wouldn't give them back into a shed and paid his rent.
And so maybe Frankenstein was amongst his papers or something.
And all the other papers, the largest collection you have in the Portland, the Lovelace Bar.
And one seem to be fairly large. But I didn't.
Yeah, but of the 19th century literary collections, I would say is the largest if you go Shelley Wolstencroft and go together.
So that's you know, it's. 20,000 pieces of paper or some very large body of material.
I don't think I would have ever embarked on the life of Mary Shelley if I'd known that.
And I can't think of another literary collection of the 19th century.
Benjamin Disraeli. And, you know, yes, politics as well as literature of a similar size and scope.
So I think our time is now elapsed. Thank you very much indeed for coming along and joining us.
Please do go and see your current exhibition called From Sappho to Suffrage, which is subtitled Women Who Dance.
And you will see some other features of Frankenstein in that exhibition.
And you'll also see we have two great biographies of Ada Lovelace, Byron here, Miranda and Ursula martin.
You will see some pages from the Ada Lovelace Archive.
You'll also see some of Jane Austen manuscripts. It's free to invite all these.
Going to see. Thank you for.