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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.

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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.

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These guys made their about the margins but things like Black Sheep previously noted.

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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.

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And we have Maureen, who is Mary Shelley's biographer, and the biography has been reissued for the bicentenary of her birth.

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But that's very good. And The New York Times called it affectionate, and the Independent called it brilliant and enthralling.

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And Sophie is no less than any of those things today. And we also have Stephen Harper,

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who's on the staff of the special collections of both the library and who'll be hopefully manipulating some of the material evidence.

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And he's the author of this, which is available in the Baldwin Library Bookshop.

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And I should also say, if you would like to buy Miranda's books afterwards,

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if you go downstairs to the seated area, the white sofa area will look quite like 70,000.

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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.

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Very easily done. Well, thank you very much for coming. And please welcome the guests.

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So, gentlemen, thank you very much indeed for coming to the library.

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We have on the screen a poster for Frankenstein.

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It's obviously a book which was originally published on the 1st of January 2018.

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So it's one of the focus focuses for our event today is to be celebrating commemorate the bicentenary of its publication,

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but also to mark how it's become so pervasive in our culture.

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And that's partly because of all the film adaptations.

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I think it's hard to find a novel which has had more cinematic and TV adaptations than Frankenstein,

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and it's of course become a what's the phrase loan word or something.

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You know, you see it attributed to all sorts of concoctions of financial or information technology.

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If something is not being done well, it's described as a Frankenstein of a policy or you get the you get the drift.

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So we're going to take our story back to the origins of this great work,

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this highly influential work, and to retrace the mind and the actions of the author,

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Mary Shelley, and the various collaborators who she worked with in order to create this astonishing piece of art and culture.

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And we're going to begin with the first of three manuscript notebooks.

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And we're we're going to actually look at four notebooks today and four printed books.

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And three of the notebooks are the manuscripts of Frankenstein.

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And this is a photograph of what the first of these notebooks looks like.

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And we call it Notebook A. It's also known as the Geneva Notebook.

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Now, when it came to us in the 1970s, it was just a stack, a pile of loose sheets of paper.

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And what my colleagues have done is sort of reassemble it as if it was just torn out of its original binding.

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So we're going back to to 1816.

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So this is the second European trip that Percy and Mary and her boyfriend still Percy Shelley took.

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And I'm going to ask Miranda to tell the story in a second of the famous evening spent in Geneva.

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But this notebook was purchased in a Genevan Stationers shop, and it contains, if you look carefully at the paper,

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it's watermarked with the watermark of a genevan paper maker called Devil Devote Liberal,

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whose mill was active just 20 kilometres on the French side, just outside of Geneva.

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And so we've got to think ourselves back to Mary Shelley going and buying this notebook.

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We'll have a look at it in a little bit more detail in a second.

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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.

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But it was originally bound. And you can see these saw marks in the paper for where the buying, the original binding had stitching,

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which kept the sheets together in probably a leather, a limp leather cover, which is now at some point torn off.

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We don't know exactly when, but that's kind of what it looks like of all the bits of paper are assembled.

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But what we have done is to carefully put them into guard, which we call forensic rules,

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so that you can properly handle without damaging the originals.

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Let's go back, Miranda, to the second trip of Percy and Mary.

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And they arrive in Geneva. And where do they go?

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Well, this is one of these difficult ones where I think when should I stop, say, neurotically at my watch?

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Because I could I could take over and go on for 40 minutes, but I promise not to about five.

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They went from the hotel which they'd arrived in on.

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They'd come with Clare Clairmont, who was Mary's stepsister, who was in hot pursuit of Lord Byron,

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and they all knew that Lord Byron was coming out of Geneva. So that was the object of the exercise.

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And in fact they arrived in such a hurry, they got there ahead of him, and Byron turned up a little later.

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And because he was always extremely shy and he intensely disliked in the year that he'd sensationally been left by his wife,

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the being the object of interest in the hotel. So he took a wonderful, very grand house that was called Villa Diodati,

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which I think Milton stayed in years before, but it was a very grand house looking across.

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They could actually still see him from the hotel,

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and the rather enterprising hotel owner put up telescopes on on the terraces and charged people to have a good look.

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And they'd say, We can see his sheets or we can see the ladies going in and out.

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And they got very imaginative, Shelley and Claire and Mary and little was it Little William or Little Clara at this point,

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until William moved into a much smaller house nearby, sort of in the shadow of the Villa Diodati.

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And because this was famously the summer of darkness, and their little house was very, very small and dark.

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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.

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And we have to imagine, as all the film makers have done in the summer of Darkness, mostly they had the shutters closed,

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but at 4:00 in the afternoon they would need to have the shutters closed and the candles lit because there was no light.

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Byron wrote an extraordinary poem called Darkness, which I think inspired Mary Shelley's last man.

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It's an imagining of the end of the world and this kind of terrible blankness and ice and desolation.

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And they were all both frightened and elated by the feeling that was conjured up by the atmosphere and so on.

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The famous night, as retold by both Doctor Polidori, who was Byron's physician,

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would come out with him and he was keeping a diary for John Murray Barnes and anything about it.

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He was keeping notes on everything Byron was doing and also by who else was keeping notes there.

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Anybody at that point named Mary was.

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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,

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very clear account. We've got Mary's wonderful 1831 account of 1816.

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We'll look at that and we'll look at that later.

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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.

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Do you want me to carry on or to stop that carry on? Okay.

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Sorry. As you see what I mean, I kind of rather carry on. So they did things like they read out ghost stories.

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And Byron, who had been very thrilled by Coleridge's Kublai Khan and Pains of Sleep and Cristobal,

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which were published with some money from Byron getting into the production and the little copy of that to just come out to Geneva.

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So Byron, I think, read aloud from Cristobal a particularly sensational passage in which there's a terrifying dream,

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and Cristobal is the kind of spooky figure appears and looks pretty creepy indeed.

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And Shelley, who I think we all assume had been into Dr. Polidori, his chest of medications and got her visa,

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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.

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So you can see it was an atmosphere of massive over excitement.

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And in this atmosphere, Byron suggested that they should.

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All right. Ghost stories. This is why I must keep away from 1831, because we get confused.

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Anyway, they were all going to write stories. Yes. And so Mary does write a story.

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And we don't exactly know when she decided to write it down.

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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.

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So why don't we actually look at what this notebook does and we're going to turn first.

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So this is notebook. This is the first the earliest surviving draft of Frankenstein.

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And you can see it's on this blue paper.

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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.

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And I think and so this, of course, has been torn out of its original binding.

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So please imagine this in a blank book bought from the station.

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And Mary has ruled the paper. So she's ruled it, presumably so that it can be annotated,

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so that corrective corrections or suggestions for altering the text can be made in the margin.

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And it's also got a chapter heading at the start.

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So again, you can assume that Mary in her mind was thinking this is going to end up as a publication

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or that she is kind of self-publishing here in manuscript form and numbering the pages.

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Numbering the pages. That could have happened later, presumably, but I don't think the chapter headings,

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the chapter paintings are obviously kind of set out from the start.

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But you're right, she could have number them as she going along or it could have happened at the end.

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But you can see that this hand is the hand of Mary Shelley.

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And so the bulk of the text is written out by her.

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And then Percy has come along and made amend options here, which she clearly wanted.

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I think we were talking about this before, and it's a subject of endless fascination to anybody.

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Looking at Frankenstein is how this collaboration worked, because back in the seventies, when there was all that sort of thing,

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that the kind of everything men did was bad, let's put it loosely like that, and everything women did was good.

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So at that point, Percy Shelley was very, very bad, and everything he did to this book was destructive and ornate,

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and that really it should have just been left as Mary wrote it.

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But what we can see here from these margins is that Mary was inviting him to comments, and there are actually clear signs of,

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some would say, of them actually even sitting in bed together, amending it and passing the pages across the bed.

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Although that was put by Percy at one point saying, Oh, my pretty pixie, the word is, Oh, come on for that lady.

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Yes, we did that. Quite how they did. Yes. But what we do know.

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So if you just look here, you can see Percy making.

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We're going to zoom in. Good. And here you can see Percy writing on.

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Now he's doing this at a pace because if we turn the page of the to the previous leaf in sequence,

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you can see at the bottom that those mendacious is in Percy's hand of Blotted.

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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.

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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.

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So you can see that there's a kind of you talk about the fever of the the night where the ideas were generated.

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But there's a certain sort of impatience in the collection of the text.

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But why don't we go why don't we move on to a book?

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Actually, before we do that, can we go to Page Folio 24?

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Um, you know, let's, I'm just going to, let's.

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Later. So here we just kind of ask you to bear these little calculations in mind.

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So these are very careful page counts.

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So just bear that in mind because they're trying to work out the the pagination,

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how the story will be laid out when it eventually comes to a publication.

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And when you see they mean Mary, Mary and Percy together, we assume.

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Yeah. Okay. So moving swiftly on to Folio 24.

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I'm sorry. Sorry. I was just saying, I'm always amazed when I look at this,

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seeing how clear her handwriting is and how rapidly she was writing with such confidence that it's extraordinary.

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Okay. So we're going to cut to the inch the key action in the novel.

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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.

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I collected instruments of life around me that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.

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It was already one in the morning. The rain patted dismally against the window and my candle was nearly burnt out when,

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by the glimmer of the half thick, half extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open.

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It breathed hard and the convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

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And there. That's exactly how she wrote it with just a few little suggestions by Percy of that text.

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But she had clearly, you know, the kind of the pacing of that opening paragraph of Chapter seven is just extraordinary.

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I mean, this kind of very evocative, almost cinematic.

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But that does fit, of course, with I know it is jumping ahead 1831 to the green,

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which is when she described the dream in which the creature first appeared to her in Frankenstein.

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But when you actually see this and see the clarity and speed and certainty with which it set out,

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it does seem to bear out the idea that she really had this image in her mind.

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It's so unusual to see something that has this immediacy.

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It does beg the question, was there an earlier draft? Were there much sketchier?

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Was there another notebook or sheets of paper that were much sketchier and which

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are lost and that they were then sort of worked out and laid out on in this note?

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But we just don't know because it seems almost incredible that it wasn't.

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I mean, it's such confidence. Yeah, but again, you can see Percy here, so he's right.

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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.

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You just see here. Then she rewrites and so on.

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And then this is crossed out by Percy, who writes Beautiful instead.

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But there's handsome in the margin in Mary's hand, again and again.

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Beautiful. So is she getting fed up with him saying, no, no, no, no, it's not beautiful.

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It's handsome. I've already written this. But then she she does she give in to beautiful finally.

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Well, we know that she does give in because there in the finished text is the word beautiful.

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And I think it was on Mellor, who is one of the best commenters on on this collaboration.

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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.

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But it does actually raise a very frivolous point. I was having great fun with my granddaughters this morning.

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I said I was coming off to Oxford to talk about Frankenstein, like all other little girls about Frankenstein.

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And I said, Now you tell me what you think about somebody,

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a creator who went out of his way to assemble all these pieces of a body together to make perhaps his own son,

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and then chose to make him eight foot tall. And why would you make your creature eight foot tall?

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And they thought, first of all, it was they would be better at gobbling up sweets.

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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,

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look, this is my creation, because actually, if he'd just created somebody of our height, who would ever believe him that.

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But anyway, beautiful and handsome, as we will know, he was not.

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Yes, yes, indeed, indeed. And there. But there are sort of saying.

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He's he's yellow skinned is improved I think from done.

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But was this necessary to insert his his hair was flowing but his hair of a lustrous black was flowing is you know,

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I think there was a curious detail, but with debates about whether he's over embellishing.

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Well I think that that's what does come through in and Melas but what she is rather critical of Percy and she says

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that his language is very flowery that he's actually imposing a poetic language on Mary's much more direct language.

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And I think the can be said something for that but the other pieces were he actually

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clarifies what she says and she talks about the workshop in which the creature is created,

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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.

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But Percy's hand is very much a black ink, and Mary's is this slightly, slightly lighter ink.

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I do you think that was deliberate so that they could actually work out which the commendations were false?

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I don't know if that doesn't sound. I don't think so.

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It certainly is very lazy about something that is not sorry that he was very lazy about sharpening this with this pattern.

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So this is writing tends to be happening because of.

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Okay. Let's move on. And we're going to kind of fast forward from 1816, from the summer of 1816 to September.

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So they returned to Britain on the 18th of September, 1816.

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And how old is how old are they at this point? I'm always terrible at this one.

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00:22:13,930 --> 00:22:21,930
You do. It's so many is 18 right by that and Percy is 23.

193
00:22:22,130 --> 00:22:34,600
23 very, very young. Anyway, extraordinary to think of herself, Mary, with an idea that she is going to publish herself.

194
00:22:34,600 --> 00:22:43,690
So you think of that Geneva notebook with the chapter headings laid out with this kind of sense that they're going to publish.

195
00:22:43,900 --> 00:22:53,740
Although she always said that my husband was always inciting me to obtain literary respect, she put it on to Percy.

196
00:22:54,220 --> 00:22:57,880
It wasn't her, it was him. Whether we believe that or not, I'm not sure.

197
00:22:58,660 --> 00:23:07,210
So they were trying to buy off the rent a property in bath and in bath.

198
00:23:07,630 --> 00:23:11,590
Mary goes into another station, a shop buys another notebook.

199
00:23:12,100 --> 00:23:26,429
Perhaps we should this. And Claire Clement gives birth to a child and produces the little baby that might have been barren.

200
00:23:26,430 --> 00:23:31,350
So I always rather mischievously think might have been Shelley's it looked remarkably like Shelley.

201
00:23:32,100 --> 00:23:40,739
So here's the stack of again, loose sheets that came to us in the 1970s on deposit, which again,

202
00:23:40,740 --> 00:23:48,530
my colleagues have kind of stuck together as if it had just been torn out of the original notebook.

203
00:23:48,760 --> 00:24:00,629
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.

204
00:24:00,630 --> 00:24:07,020
Perhaps here you can just faintly get the sense that the ends of the pages were marbles.

205
00:24:07,020 --> 00:24:12,209
So this was a blank notebook which had marbled edges of the paper.

206
00:24:12,210 --> 00:24:19,050
When it was closed, it had this marble marbled decoration which is being recorded as quite an expensive little notebook.

207
00:24:19,500 --> 00:24:27,180
We also saw something special, a large paper out. So these are more kind of cheap things because we don't have the findings.

208
00:24:27,180 --> 00:24:30,299
So that's often a good indication of whether binding.

209
00:24:30,300 --> 00:24:36,060
We think probably a little clever binding because that would tell us something of her regard for her work.

210
00:24:36,060 --> 00:24:40,380
I suppose the kind of note when she wanted a large paper to get the novel.

211
00:24:42,750 --> 00:24:49,379
But this paper is Watermark 1806, so it had been in the station shop for ten years,

212
00:24:49,380 --> 00:24:52,650
which might support the idea that it was quite an expensive notebook.

213
00:24:52,650 --> 00:25:03,660
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.

214
00:25:03,660 --> 00:25:10,320
So opinions is fairly low, but it is a cream coloured paper rather than the blue paper of the Geneva.

215
00:25:12,540 --> 00:25:22,259
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.

216
00:25:22,260 --> 00:25:25,960
So we also have that manuscript here involved in that.

217
00:25:25,980 --> 00:25:31,290
It's torn out of this notebook. So to write that one, which rather undercuts what I was saying,

218
00:25:31,290 --> 00:25:36,180
because if it was such a special book, would he have been allowed to do that by Mary Snow?

219
00:25:36,780 --> 00:25:40,560
Yes. Who knows? Who knows? So but what we can say.

220
00:25:40,570 --> 00:25:46,260
Let's go back. Stephen, sorry for mocking you about.

221
00:25:48,460 --> 00:25:52,050
So we came back to the this is the bath notebook.

222
00:25:52,060 --> 00:25:56,050
This is on the cream coloured paper and you can see this on that.

223
00:25:56,200 --> 00:26:00,009
She hasn't ruled it in exactly the same way as some of the pages,

224
00:26:00,010 --> 00:26:06,910
didn't have wide margins to allow for that kind of collaborative annotation that we've seen before.

225
00:26:07,210 --> 00:26:17,590
But we can see Pelosi still manipulating the sheets here, but very few of the same book has generally fewer annotations.

226
00:26:17,590 --> 00:26:23,320
But this is where she's got into the observed, I think with the is, isn't it?

227
00:26:23,440 --> 00:26:26,910
Which is where I might be. I can't see quite what we've got.

228
00:26:27,250 --> 00:26:29,950
So he's just moving out of London here.

229
00:26:30,340 --> 00:26:43,780
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.

230
00:26:44,320 --> 00:26:52,570
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.

231
00:26:52,600 --> 00:26:57,730
I think this is a slightly kind of faster hand here.

232
00:26:58,300 --> 00:27:01,610
I think I get the sense that she's going to be more quoted in the first one.

233
00:27:01,660 --> 00:27:06,080
But from thence we proceeded to Oxford.

234
00:27:08,980 --> 00:27:15,250
We were charmed with the appearance of the town. The colleges are ancient and picturesque.

235
00:27:16,900 --> 00:27:24,510
The. Streets, the streets broad and the landscape.

236
00:27:27,630 --> 00:27:43,170
Redmond. Redmond is perfect until it's perfect by the lovely places which spreads into broad, broad and.

237
00:27:45,610 --> 00:27:48,610
Plus Paramount, plus the glasses.

238
00:27:48,760 --> 00:27:53,920
I think you know this one by heart. SIP of water and run the south of the town.

239
00:27:54,610 --> 00:28:03,190
We cans of lettuce to several of the professors who received us with great politeness and cordiality.

240
00:28:03,520 --> 00:28:12,130
We found that the regulations of this university were much improved since the days of giving them.

241
00:28:12,970 --> 00:28:19,690
But there is still infraction. A great deal of bigotry and devotion to established rules that.

242
00:28:23,990 --> 00:28:38,270
Constrain the minds of the students and lead to slavish and narrow principles and discuss what we should sit with.

243
00:28:38,930 --> 00:28:44,090
We should discuss it. Well, not really, but just wonder about it in the context of things.

244
00:28:44,240 --> 00:28:53,120
Yes, many, many enormities were also practised, which,

245
00:28:53,120 --> 00:29:02,330
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.

246
00:29:03,050 --> 00:29:14,090
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.

247
00:29:15,230 --> 00:29:18,500
The masters were angry. And there.

248
00:29:23,260 --> 00:29:30,460
Stephen, help me out. I'm bit stumped. Something resolute as.

249
00:29:31,560 --> 00:29:38,090
That during our stay, two of the students were on the point of being expelled.

250
00:29:38,730 --> 00:29:50,940
This very question, on this very question, the this something severity caused a considerable change in the costume of the gentlemen for several days.

251
00:29:50,940 --> 00:30:05,100
So they obviously changed the colour it. Now of course two students who were disobeying their superiors perhaps is a reference back to Percy

252
00:30:05,370 --> 00:30:11,580
and the Thomas Jefferson for his friend who were undergraduates in University College Oxford,

253
00:30:11,760 --> 00:30:17,879
just a few yards from where we're sitting and were indeed expelled in the second term of

254
00:30:17,880 --> 00:30:25,260
their first year at the university for disobeying the authorities by publishing works,

255
00:30:25,260 --> 00:30:28,950
which were not considered appropriate for their status.

256
00:30:29,580 --> 00:30:32,870
The key one being on the necessity of ageism.

257
00:30:33,870 --> 00:30:38,540
So why do we think it's come into Frankenstein is the thing that slightly puzzles me.

258
00:30:38,550 --> 00:30:45,570
We know that Shelley and Mary went on this river trip up and visited Oxford.

259
00:30:45,570 --> 00:30:54,860
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.

260
00:30:55,290 --> 00:30:59,819
And I actually I'm just I'm not asking this in a clever way where I would say, Oh, hi, Beyonce.

261
00:30:59,820 --> 00:31:03,210
I would love to know what the answer is. Why is it here at all?

262
00:31:03,630 --> 00:31:08,280
It's fascinating. But why? I think there's something about Oxford for Percy.

263
00:31:08,280 --> 00:31:16,620
There's I don't know, perhaps this is more him or she detects in him a sort of a sense of regret for

264
00:31:16,620 --> 00:31:22,020
not having completed his degree or a sense of regret for having left early.

265
00:31:23,520 --> 00:31:32,549
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.

266
00:31:32,550 --> 00:31:36,600
I encourage any of you to go and see if you haven't this extraordinary structure.

267
00:31:36,990 --> 00:31:45,320
So in the 1890s, Shelley's granddaughter, Graham's daughter, daughter in law Shelley.

268
00:31:45,750 --> 00:31:58,250
So daughter in law, that sort of piece, some gesture back to the university by funding this extraordinary statue.

269
00:31:59,580 --> 00:32:03,090
Not for the faint hearted, extraordinary. It's a very good word for it.

270
00:32:03,420 --> 00:32:10,710
There is no other. And she gave to the book the my predecessor, the Poetical Notebooks.

271
00:32:11,760 --> 00:32:21,080
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.

272
00:32:21,130 --> 00:32:29,400
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.

273
00:32:29,400 --> 00:32:34,140
There were many very difficult moments, partly because Shelley did have an eye for the ladies.

274
00:32:34,680 --> 00:32:39,930
And during this particular period when Frankenstein was being written, of course, Claire,

275
00:32:39,930 --> 00:32:46,710
who was a very large part of the problem, was completely preoccupied by Lord Byron.

276
00:32:47,010 --> 00:32:54,300
And I would think that that would mean that Shelley and Mary were most unusually close at this point,

277
00:32:54,660 --> 00:32:58,650
which sort of heightens the whole idea of the collaborative attempt.

278
00:32:58,980 --> 00:33:02,040
And Mary actually wanting to do something nice for her husband.

279
00:33:02,070 --> 00:33:05,190
Yes, why not? Yeah. Okay.

280
00:33:05,190 --> 00:33:10,570
Well, why don't we move now? Let me. This one.

281
00:33:11,960 --> 00:33:16,010
Yeah. To the notebook.

282
00:33:16,010 --> 00:33:19,250
c0c here's the here's the Shell Memorial.

283
00:33:19,640 --> 00:33:22,700
Irresistable in university college.

284
00:33:22,700 --> 00:33:25,880
It's massive scale. So this is almost life size.

285
00:33:26,540 --> 00:33:34,530
You've got to go and see. It is quite extraordinary. Let's go to Notebook C.

286
00:33:34,770 --> 00:33:41,780
So the you've seen the two notebooks, which are the drafts, you've seen the conversation between Percy and Mary.

287
00:33:42,090 --> 00:33:52,800
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.

288
00:33:53,280 --> 00:33:59,069
It actually had 11 parts, and we only have one of them that survives.

289
00:33:59,070 --> 00:34:05,250
This one here, we call it Notebook C, and you can see here that it becomes the printer's copy.

290
00:34:05,550 --> 00:34:12,420
So you can see it says volume three, page one, two, six.

291
00:34:12,420 --> 00:34:25,830
Is that. Yeah. So this is the manuscript that Percy takes around the London publishers seeking a publisher for it.

292
00:34:26,850 --> 00:34:31,889
And I was asking you earlier on what? Why we've only got this one surviving copy.

293
00:34:31,890 --> 00:34:39,810
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.

294
00:34:40,260 --> 00:34:45,970
Yeah, that's yeah, absolutely. So. But the first stage for these copies is to get a publisher.

295
00:34:46,920 --> 00:34:52,800
And he puts it in the hands of a number of the more famous publishers, including John Murray, who's buying his publisher.

296
00:34:53,490 --> 00:34:57,780
And John John Murray, the first said, no, thank you, not for us.

297
00:34:58,150 --> 00:35:03,510
And he eventually finds a publisher, James, like you, tell you to take, you know,

298
00:35:03,660 --> 00:35:09,990
who's quite a small publisher, I think was more so small compared to Morris, but also bookseller.

299
00:35:10,260 --> 00:35:25,380
Hmm. And if we go to Folio 24 with notebook, see, we can see the process of making this kind of copy in action.

300
00:35:25,860 --> 00:35:35,960
Because here we have Mary's familiar hand, which stops and Percy takes over the labour of copying from the drafts of the,

301
00:35:36,340 --> 00:35:42,020
the kind of final text which they're happy with that actually gets published in the end.

302
00:35:43,950 --> 00:35:48,810
So that's a very good that's wonderful to see with the change the change of.

303
00:35:51,400 --> 00:35:59,260
And this. This paper is watermarked 1809 by another English paper mill, Phipps.

304
00:35:59,980 --> 00:36:04,780
And again, it is obviously hung around in the station shop for some time.

305
00:36:06,980 --> 00:36:10,530
But let's go back now to this one from.

306
00:36:13,070 --> 00:36:16,520
Here. And we'll move to another note with the final note.

307
00:36:16,790 --> 00:36:20,990
We're going to look in this session, which is Mary Shelley's Journal.

308
00:36:21,770 --> 00:36:28,310
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.

309
00:36:28,350 --> 00:36:37,610
It's so if we just showed the outside with fancy and perhaps so you can see that this is a leather bound.

310
00:36:37,610 --> 00:36:42,200
We're talking about the findings of the journals earlier. This is one that's bound in leather.

311
00:36:42,200 --> 00:36:46,040
It was brought in and at the same time they were in Geneva.

312
00:36:46,220 --> 00:36:49,820
She brought this notebook and it was a blank book.

313
00:36:49,820 --> 00:36:54,050
But this time the binding has survived. It's a leather binding with gold tooling.

314
00:36:54,230 --> 00:36:58,760
And if we just look at the spine, you can see probably this is, again,

315
00:36:58,760 --> 00:37:06,740
a kind of reasonably friendly, you know, well, you know, this would have been relatively expensive.

316
00:37:07,580 --> 00:37:09,140
It would have come rent bound.

317
00:37:10,520 --> 00:37:21,049
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.

318
00:37:21,050 --> 00:37:25,850
From which date to which date? This particular one. I don't remember.

319
00:37:26,180 --> 00:37:31,310
We'll see. We'll see. Folio nine of rape two.

320
00:37:32,690 --> 00:37:38,210
And this says yes, here we are on July 21st, 1816.

321
00:37:38,570 --> 00:37:48,740
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.

322
00:37:49,070 --> 00:37:53,420
It means my happiness ended and so did the Journal at the same time.

323
00:37:53,690 --> 00:38:02,240
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,

324
00:38:02,510 --> 00:38:12,379
it's where Little William, who is a little baby boy who was out with them at Geneva, is in Rome with them.

325
00:38:12,380 --> 00:38:17,150
And he caught malaria, I think, and died.

326
00:38:17,690 --> 00:38:24,530
And there's the most heartbreaking entry, very similar to the one Mary made about her first little baby.

327
00:38:24,530 --> 00:38:29,330
She lost I think she lost five children in all. But that's yeah.

328
00:38:29,840 --> 00:38:34,260
William is very ill. But. What's it say?

329
00:38:34,590 --> 00:38:39,660
Got that evening when Miss Curran Secord.

330
00:38:40,110 --> 00:38:46,590
I'm in Friday the fourth is it. And then just this poignant blank.

331
00:38:46,830 --> 00:38:51,090
And it broke his mother's heart. How could it not? He was a sweet little boy.

332
00:38:51,540 --> 00:38:53,790
And one of the great curiosities,

333
00:38:53,790 --> 00:39:05,550
among the million curiosities of Frankenstein is why she chose to call Frankenstein's little brother who is murdered by the creature, William.

334
00:39:06,450 --> 00:39:12,960
How strange that she is with her own little William. And yet the little boy who she chooses to murder is called William.

335
00:39:13,710 --> 00:39:16,890
I don't have an answer. Let's move to.

336
00:39:16,890 --> 00:39:27,960
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.

337
00:39:29,640 --> 00:39:35,790
So she details in quite a lot of this, a Friday, the 13th of December, Saturday the 14th.

338
00:39:36,150 --> 00:39:40,320
Right. Read the lock to send it to Chesterfield.

339
00:39:40,470 --> 00:39:48,090
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.

340
00:39:48,300 --> 00:39:51,660
Shelley goes to London and returns. I'm with him.

341
00:39:51,660 --> 00:39:56,850
I was with him. Spend the time between the hands and the Godwin's a marriage takes place.

342
00:39:58,530 --> 00:40:06,810
So she went to his position. And that is because what has happened is that all the time that Mary has been with Shelley,

343
00:40:07,260 --> 00:40:12,990
there was a wife in place and two small children around Feehan Charles.

344
00:40:13,560 --> 00:40:19,980
And when Shelley and Mary first runaway together in 1814, Shelley,

345
00:40:19,980 --> 00:40:24,360
who was in some ways, if you don't mind me saying so, slightly off with the fairies,

346
00:40:24,770 --> 00:40:30,179
actually got a letter to his wife in England saying it would be wonderful if you

347
00:40:30,180 --> 00:40:35,729
could come and join this small Swiss commune where you will learn from Mary as I do.

348
00:40:35,730 --> 00:40:39,810
We can all learn from Mary. And not surprisingly, Harriet didn't reply.

349
00:40:40,530 --> 00:40:48,490
And in the autumn of 18 or 1862, tragedies happened.

350
00:40:48,510 --> 00:40:54,059
Mary's half sister, Fanny Emily, died on.

351
00:40:54,060 --> 00:40:57,209
She had committed suicide in a pub in Swansea.

352
00:40:57,210 --> 00:41:06,300
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.

353
00:41:07,020 --> 00:41:13,620
And Harriet had been found, drowned and pregnant in the Serpentine.

354
00:41:14,190 --> 00:41:19,440
And it's never been clear who the father was.

355
00:41:19,680 --> 00:41:24,440
Shelley, of course, produced some great story of it was, I can't remember some military man.

356
00:41:24,510 --> 00:41:29,910
It didn't ring very true. I, I would question who the father might be myself.

357
00:41:30,540 --> 00:41:35,729
But of course, what it did do was open the way for Shelley at last to marry Mary.

358
00:41:35,730 --> 00:41:38,850
So the marriage took place for the.

359
00:41:39,240 --> 00:41:48,750
I also just noticed here a marriage takes place read Lord Chesterfield and Locke said well most people do trust married.

360
00:41:50,640 --> 00:42:03,360
So let's move to full year 49 because here is the real reason for sharing Mary's Journal because April the 10th, 1817.

361
00:42:03,570 --> 00:42:10,520
Correct. So this is evening on a sequence of days where the manuscript is correct.

362
00:42:10,530 --> 00:42:20,830
And so I think is this some of the the notebooks, A and B with those annotations by Percy?

363
00:42:22,470 --> 00:42:26,310
Very possibly. But we see again Friday the 11th, correct.

364
00:42:26,310 --> 00:42:30,240
EF Correct. EF Correct.

365
00:42:30,240 --> 00:42:34,440
EF Correct. And is this where we first see the F being used?

366
00:42:34,440 --> 00:42:37,710
It's first got the name Frankenstein on this page. Yep.

367
00:42:39,270 --> 00:42:47,070
And then the corrections go on until the 13th of May, almost, or the 18th of April.

368
00:42:47,370 --> 00:42:53,340
Let's find the 18th of April. Transcribe after dinner, walk a little.

369
00:42:56,610 --> 00:43:03,990
So the transcription. So this is the process of copying from the fair copies from the drafts to the French copy.

370
00:43:04,470 --> 00:43:14,100
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.

371
00:43:14,520 --> 00:43:17,790
And Clare is there again with them, I think,

372
00:43:18,060 --> 00:43:25,640
and Shelley and the children and also a little girl who shall it shows always adopting little girls to little mama.

373
00:43:27,050 --> 00:43:32,940
At this point, they're all so distraught by the poverty they see because one thing, it's not really inappropriate.

374
00:43:33,030 --> 00:43:39,960
Part of the discussion. But of course, 1816 is just after Waterloo and all the years of the Napoleonic Wars.

375
00:43:40,500 --> 00:43:48,510
And one of the things that most affect Shelley when he is at Marlow, is the spectacle of terrible poverty,

376
00:43:48,690 --> 00:43:53,040
whole families standing weeping by the roadside because they haven't got anything to eat.

377
00:43:53,460 --> 00:43:58,230
So it's a rather haunting time. And perhaps that, too, finds its way into the story.

378
00:43:58,680 --> 00:44:07,810
So if we move to full year 51, the risk to. We can see on the 13th of May.

379
00:44:09,710 --> 00:44:13,630
Uh, we're done here. Finish transcribing.

380
00:44:15,890 --> 00:44:20,870
Wonderful. She basically takes a month.

381
00:44:21,140 --> 00:44:33,020
You can see transcribed transcribed transcribed, transcribed, transcribed all day work after t read Pliny She never stops Mary.

382
00:44:34,060 --> 00:44:38,270
You know, she's extraordinary. And she's the most scholarly woman.

383
00:44:38,390 --> 00:44:49,970
Extraordinary. Amazing. So I think what we should do now is move to the printed texts.

384
00:44:50,360 --> 00:44:53,720
So this is the end of our sequence of looking at the notebooks.

385
00:44:53,990 --> 00:45:00,230
And we're going to begin now and we're going to go to the 1st of January 2018.

386
00:45:00,800 --> 00:45:15,640
So the point of our. Being here is to celebrate and commemorate the the publication of Frankenstein 200 years ago.

387
00:45:16,210 --> 00:45:20,920
And you can see that the book was originally published in three volumes.

388
00:45:21,160 --> 00:45:24,600
So this is the great Victorian habit.

389
00:45:24,610 --> 00:45:28,930
All the best books are published. We call them three decades now.

390
00:45:29,920 --> 00:45:39,969
So three volume publications published, some famously, and this one has been rather handsomely bound up later in the 19th century.

391
00:45:39,970 --> 00:45:49,600
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,

392
00:45:49,870 --> 00:45:58,149
although he was he was entitled to a free copy of this straight from the publishers as a library of legal deposit under the

393
00:45:58,150 --> 00:46:09,010
copyright to Queen Anne refused to take it because it was another book with a great library like the body one trashed like this.

394
00:46:09,010 --> 00:46:11,379
Well, particularly Frankenstein, of course,

395
00:46:11,380 --> 00:46:20,950
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.

396
00:46:21,580 --> 00:46:29,440
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.

397
00:46:29,890 --> 00:46:36,910
So maybe the Bodleian felt the same way. So the key thing to know, expand this so we can see it printed in London.

398
00:46:36,910 --> 00:46:43,870
It's published in London is printed for Lexington Hughes, Harding, May and Jones in Finsbury Square in 1818.

399
00:46:44,200 --> 00:46:48,090
And the title is Frankenstein of the Modern Prometheus.

400
00:46:48,430 --> 00:46:53,770
Conceit tells us that it's published in three volumes, the little quote from Milton here.

401
00:46:55,030 --> 00:46:58,510
So that's interesting. I've forgotten that.

402
00:46:59,350 --> 00:47:02,560
I hope I'm right about that. So I'm fairly interested,

403
00:47:02,770 --> 00:47:08,709
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

404
00:47:08,710 --> 00:47:17,160
not appear you know so which is why Scott great and praised Percy which annoyed how great the internet park is.

405
00:47:17,230 --> 00:47:21,549
If you remember from the fair copy Percy had gone around,

406
00:47:21,550 --> 00:47:29,110
the publishers keep putting it in their hands and he was quite ambiguous, I think, about who the publisher was.

407
00:47:29,410 --> 00:47:37,120
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,

408
00:47:37,120 --> 00:47:40,630
who was, you know, not known as an author.

409
00:47:40,870 --> 00:47:45,070
But there is a nice letter from Shelley to Lachlan to the publisher.

410
00:47:45,580 --> 00:47:52,900
I want to mention that the the novel which I sent him is not my own production, but that of a friend.

411
00:47:53,140 --> 00:48:00,820
You know, being present in England cannot make the corrections we suggest as to any me inaccuracies, inaccuracies of language.

412
00:48:01,000 --> 00:48:06,940
I should feel myself authorised to to amend them when reading proofs.

413
00:48:07,270 --> 00:48:10,329
So I wonder if the person abroad he's kind of into.

414
00:48:10,330 --> 00:48:13,870
Maggie Byron Interesting. Interesting.

415
00:48:13,870 --> 00:48:20,199
He could have been would you think? Stephen I honestly don't know.

416
00:48:20,200 --> 00:48:24,849
I just think he was being, you know, distancing himself from the novel.

417
00:48:24,850 --> 00:48:28,420
So no one thought it was him? I think so, yeah. Yeah.

418
00:48:29,320 --> 00:48:32,440
So here's the first here's the first edition.

419
00:48:32,440 --> 00:48:40,420
I've had the privilege of seeing a copy of this which was signed to Byron from the author.

420
00:48:40,450 --> 00:48:47,350
Oh, that one. I saw that one too. It was so exciting that was discovered and so did Peter Harrington's, I think.

421
00:48:47,740 --> 00:48:50,980
And only the first volume emerged, didn't it? Yeah.

422
00:48:51,370 --> 00:48:56,410
So let's go on now to the second edition.

423
00:48:56,860 --> 00:49:00,009
It does just pause for a moment on what you just said.

424
00:49:00,010 --> 00:49:05,739
It does show how proud Mary was of this production that she wanted to send a copy of,

425
00:49:05,740 --> 00:49:09,490
making it extremely clear that it was her who had written it to Lord Byron.

426
00:49:09,490 --> 00:49:13,630
Yes, it says everything about her delight in her work.

427
00:49:14,930 --> 00:49:28,210
So by the time we get to 1923, we have the second edition and this is attributed to Mary.

428
00:49:28,540 --> 00:49:33,550
So this is the first time that her name becomes associated with the world.

429
00:49:33,610 --> 00:49:36,490
And Shelley is not dead. Shelley is in it.

430
00:49:36,670 --> 00:49:43,960
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.

431
00:49:45,850 --> 00:49:53,379
I think that so much kind of correspondence perhaps between the circle of Shelley, all those right, Byron and so on.

432
00:49:53,380 --> 00:49:58,570
Home in Italy, her name becomes more widely associated with.

433
00:49:58,990 --> 00:50:03,670
Yes, yes. Not just her name, but her mother's name because it's Mary Wills to.

434
00:50:03,940 --> 00:50:17,030
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.

435
00:50:17,130 --> 00:50:22,120
So this slightly cheaper production, we changed publishers.

436
00:50:22,120 --> 00:50:32,379
So Lexington sold the copyright to Whitaker, and it's republished in two volumes,

437
00:50:32,380 --> 00:50:42,400
which can be more easily found together and a slightly cheaper production to pay for his own cheat sheet of the the first edition.

438
00:50:42,850 --> 00:50:52,209
And then that's moved to the third edition. Um, so in 1831, a third printing comes out.

439
00:50:52,210 --> 00:50:57,250
We actually have a slight eternity copy. You got the famous picture at the front.

440
00:50:57,250 --> 00:51:04,510
It is the first piece illustrated. So. And this is a very becomes a very famous illustration.

441
00:51:06,280 --> 00:51:11,240
We can think back to that discussion about handsome abuse for when we look at the creature.

442
00:51:12,350 --> 00:51:22,160
Yes, indeed. So this addition is particularly important because of the introduction.

443
00:51:23,760 --> 00:51:30,810
We just pause at the top of the page just for a moment. Um, so it's just not me.

444
00:51:30,890 --> 00:51:37,200
The interesting times you saw with her, she's published other, other, other books,

445
00:51:37,560 --> 00:51:41,280
which I think also didn't carry her name because the Shelley family,

446
00:51:41,280 --> 00:51:48,390
by then it said, Your name takes the sacred name of Shelley, so she could only be by the author of Frankenstein.

447
00:51:49,450 --> 00:52:00,510
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.

448
00:52:01,230 --> 00:52:11,060
And she talks here about being a daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity.

449
00:52:11,070 --> 00:52:17,219
So Mary Wollstonecraft and we Godwin, she returned the page.

450
00:52:17,220 --> 00:52:20,420
Stephen, perhaps.

451
00:52:21,890 --> 00:52:27,200
Yes. In the summer of 1860 we visited Switzerland and became the neighbours of Lord Byron.

452
00:52:29,000 --> 00:52:34,400
It proved a wet, congenial summer and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house.

453
00:52:34,910 --> 00:52:39,260
Some volumes of ghost stories translated from the German and French fell into our hands.

454
00:52:40,310 --> 00:52:45,590
And then. Yes.

455
00:52:45,830 --> 00:52:49,710
Turn over. Yeah.

456
00:52:50,080 --> 00:52:55,270
Yes. Nightwing on this talk and even the witching hour going by before you retire to rest.

457
00:52:55,540 --> 00:52:58,630
When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep.

458
00:52:58,960 --> 00:53:08,200
Nor could I be sad to think. So this idea of the waking dream, to quote, keeps my imagination unbidden, possessed and guided me,

459
00:53:08,200 --> 00:53:12,429
gifting the successive images that arise in my mind with a vividness far beyond

460
00:53:12,430 --> 00:53:17,230
the usual bounds of reverie I saw with eyes shut for acute mental vision,

461
00:53:17,410 --> 00:53:22,270
I saw the pale students of how they dance, kneeling beside the figure and put together.

462
00:53:24,440 --> 00:53:32,510
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.

463
00:53:32,570 --> 00:53:43,220
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,

464
00:53:43,730 --> 00:53:51,860
including, you know, multiple books of everything. We've got more have almost pieces of paper in the in the show.

465
00:53:52,910 --> 00:54:00,230
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.

466
00:54:00,260 --> 00:54:06,040
I began that day with the words it was on on a dreary night in November making and a

467
00:54:06,080 --> 00:54:10,360
transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream of that transcript hasn't started.

468
00:54:10,930 --> 00:54:20,510
Hmm. Yeah. So that. That there was some earlier which would help explain what we were discussing earlier about the extraordinary,

469
00:54:20,960 --> 00:54:24,710
eerie fluency with which she actually produced that late passage.

470
00:54:25,190 --> 00:54:30,919
She'd been over it already, so I can't remember.

471
00:54:30,920 --> 00:54:38,120
Is it actually signed by Mary the introduction and the US, Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley.

472
00:54:39,770 --> 00:54:51,049
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.

473
00:54:51,050 --> 00:54:55,730
I think she comes back in August. She says, I found myself a celebrity.

474
00:54:55,940 --> 00:55:00,800
She's citing power in this. And she lo. I find my work and find myself famous.

475
00:55:00,960 --> 00:55:11,660
Right. And she's citing her. Well, excellent. But the reason why she's so inspiring in that way is because her novel,

476
00:55:12,140 --> 00:55:17,780
published in 1880 and the subsequent three years, has been adapted for the stage.

477
00:55:19,030 --> 00:55:25,020
And assumption is adapted in a version called presumption.

478
00:55:25,030 --> 00:55:33,099
So and this is the play you build the poster for the first performance of the play on the Monday,

479
00:55:33,100 --> 00:55:40,060
July the 2018 23 will be produced for the first time an entirely new romance of a peculiar,

480
00:55:40,600 --> 00:55:45,100
peculiar interest entitled Presumption or the Fate of Frankenstein.

481
00:55:45,940 --> 00:55:50,770
And it's performed at the face of all the English Opera House on the Strand in London.

482
00:55:52,630 --> 00:55:57,730
And you can see that Victor Frankenstein is played by Mr. Wallace.

483
00:55:58,100 --> 00:56:02,350
There are various other characters, but here the monster of the creature.

484
00:56:04,160 --> 00:56:11,050
So horrific that you. The score I give the name to it is just a series of dots.

485
00:56:11,140 --> 00:56:13,810
They were tremendous on doing the promotion for this.

486
00:56:13,820 --> 00:56:20,110
They had people marching through the streets with placards saying, Danger to your life and your wits.

487
00:56:20,120 --> 00:56:23,860
If you go and see this terrifying production, stay away from it.

488
00:56:24,130 --> 00:56:30,910
So of course, the crowds flocked in and that was such a success that when Mary wrote her

489
00:56:30,910 --> 00:56:35,649
introduction in 1831 and it was the first time she'd actually got some money,

490
00:56:35,650 --> 00:56:47,770
I think for Frankenstein, she'd been paid £30 by Bentley's, and she put the word presumption in very deliberately into her introduction.

491
00:56:47,770 --> 00:56:51,640
And this kind of referencing this, because it was such a famous production,

492
00:56:52,000 --> 00:57:01,060
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.

493
00:57:01,290 --> 00:57:06,459
So but what at this point has a number of the play goes for the early performances

494
00:57:06,460 --> 00:57:13,150
and we'll just we'll just turn the pages just then you get a sense of these posters.

495
00:57:13,720 --> 00:57:20,320
So that's the first production, and then we have the second time,

496
00:57:20,440 --> 00:57:27,729
always with other different plays going on with this little place where Charlene dined and love them on the roses.

497
00:57:27,730 --> 00:57:32,890
And then the third time is performed, goes along as fine, free and easy.

498
00:57:33,460 --> 00:57:41,260
And then the fourth time we have a Roman for an Oliver and the rival soldiers.

499
00:57:43,560 --> 00:57:47,100
And the fifth performance with Gretna Green.

500
00:57:48,060 --> 00:57:51,060
And where shall I dine? It's coming up at lunchtime.

501
00:57:55,110 --> 00:58:07,389
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,

502
00:58:07,390 --> 00:58:17,670
and the sense of it being a dramatic of this novel, having a dramatic life outside of the text itself.

503
00:58:18,030 --> 00:58:22,590
But that actually begins very, very early on in its history, back in the 1923.

504
00:58:23,610 --> 00:58:30,120
So I think perhaps as it is now, 5 to 1, we should probably pause will lay these things out,

505
00:58:30,120 --> 00:58:33,930
but particularly invites some questions from you at this point.

506
00:58:36,690 --> 00:58:43,210
The changed and the difference in the second and third edition on.

507
00:58:43,450 --> 00:58:46,450
I don't think not. Not significantly.

508
00:58:47,500 --> 00:58:50,400
I'm just I think. Not at all, actually.

509
00:58:50,410 --> 00:58:59,110
I think the text itself wasn't changed at the end of the introduction of after the first production was not right or.

510
00:59:00,840 --> 00:59:04,770
Didn't. Instruments after after 1831?

511
00:59:05,940 --> 00:59:09,720
Yes. I don't know. Not nothing very significant.

512
00:59:09,930 --> 00:59:14,489
But it was really the introduction that just shed a whole new light opponent.

513
00:59:14,490 --> 00:59:18,899
And I get the feeling that, you know, perhaps if she did, sorry she did.

514
00:59:18,900 --> 00:59:25,770
You're quite right. She introduced the implication of governance ism into the 1831 edition.

515
00:59:25,770 --> 00:59:30,180
You know, the idea of how the creature was animated and jolted into life.

516
00:59:30,600 --> 00:59:34,440
And that appears for the first time in 1831. So.

517
00:59:39,750 --> 00:59:45,719
I mean. Yes, I do. Sorry.

518
00:59:45,720 --> 00:59:51,690
Can't hear. Why was it called resumption? Oh. Oh, that's an easy one to answer.

519
00:59:51,700 --> 01:00:02,099
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,

520
01:00:02,100 --> 01:00:07,680
the Promethean thing and the whole idea of the Promethean myth is presumption.

521
01:00:07,890 --> 01:00:14,860
So that's what is playing with. This is the scrutiny that witness I'm sorry.

522
01:00:14,860 --> 01:00:22,440
The description presumptions do exist. I do not in the program that the of it.

523
01:00:23,670 --> 01:00:29,170
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.

524
01:00:29,170 --> 01:00:32,440
But it struck me as safety, which is incredibly rare.

525
01:00:32,470 --> 01:00:35,680
Dramatisations of the story. Hmm.

526
01:00:36,400 --> 01:00:40,010
It sounds as though it may be more painful. Right?

527
01:00:40,620 --> 01:00:44,350
Yeah. Of course.

528
01:00:44,720 --> 01:00:48,370
Yeah. Tex come to the borderline.

529
01:00:48,370 --> 01:00:54,370
Did it actually get the manuscript manuscripts just passed down through it?

530
01:00:54,700 --> 01:01:00,070
Yes, they do. So there are various branches of the families out there.

531
01:01:00,170 --> 01:01:06,190
Yeah. So Lady Friend in 1991 gives us the first tranche of the Shelly's notebooks,

532
01:01:06,400 --> 01:01:12,590
a letter from the boys, and then another descended from Shelley Rose in the 1940.

533
01:01:12,640 --> 01:01:17,620
Gives this other name and then the other side of the family, Mary's side.

534
01:01:17,980 --> 01:01:25,300
The manuscripts were collected in a place called Boscombe House in Nepal within Dorset.

535
01:01:25,960 --> 01:01:36,010
And this becomes a come and the shrine, I suppose, and, uh, the, the, the line.

536
01:01:36,280 --> 01:01:43,809
Now I'm going to lose track of the immediate descendants romance.

537
01:01:43,810 --> 01:01:48,070
And there's an adoption marriage to the Scarlet family.

538
01:01:48,220 --> 01:01:53,760
Yes, they have Mary Shelley's son. I'm sorry, Percy and Mary Shelley some further.

539
01:01:55,120 --> 01:01:58,900
He was married to Jacob.

540
01:01:59,680 --> 01:02:06,130
They have an adopted daughter called Bessie. And Bessie married Scarlett, who later became a Black Avenger.

541
01:02:06,670 --> 01:02:08,770
And then it passed down through the world, Avengers.

542
01:02:08,920 --> 01:02:19,870
And then in in the 1970s, think all that interested in politics and in the both of them so that scholars used them.

543
01:02:20,440 --> 01:02:31,300
And then in 2004 of 2000 to the AFL died and the ninth story that a parent died and the ninth family,

544
01:02:31,330 --> 01:02:36,430
Ebinger decides to sell the manuscripts and gives us first refusal.

545
01:02:37,270 --> 01:02:43,179
So that was my first job here in Morgan, which was to raise the money for the amateur papers,

546
01:02:43,180 --> 01:02:51,729
which has the Frankenstein manuscripts that hope that the most important things we would say included the joint journals of Percy and Mary,

547
01:02:51,730 --> 01:03:00,430
like the one that we've seen this morning, and then thousands of other drafts and particularly correspondence.

548
01:03:00,940 --> 01:03:07,659
Is this actually larger talk just on the History Frankenstein manuscript?

549
01:03:07,660 --> 01:03:15,970
If we go back to early 2019, Mary Shelley had to leave England in a hurry because that was the that.

550
01:03:16,690 --> 01:03:21,880
And they gave a whole lot of things behind, including probably the manuscript of Frankenstein.

551
01:03:22,720 --> 01:03:27,880
So it left the family and then it was pulled back by the family in the late 19th century.

552
01:03:28,060 --> 01:03:35,410
Well, from someone coincidentally we got a picture, so it was between 1818.

553
01:03:35,410 --> 01:03:44,270
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,

554
01:03:44,270 --> 01:03:48,380
what had happened during the 19th century like organised accounts at the time.

555
01:03:48,390 --> 01:03:49,760
So he never paid his bills.

556
01:03:50,960 --> 01:03:57,650
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.

557
01:03:58,500 --> 01:04:03,180
And so maybe Frankenstein was amongst his papers or something.

558
01:04:03,830 --> 01:04:09,770
And all the other papers, the largest collection you have in the Portland, the Lovelace Bar.

559
01:04:09,770 --> 01:04:11,920
And one seem to be fairly large. But I didn't.

560
01:04:12,990 --> 01:04:22,610
Yeah, but of the 19th century literary collections, I would say is the largest if you go Shelley Wolstencroft and go together.

561
01:04:22,970 --> 01:04:32,030
So that's you know, it's. 20,000 pieces of paper or some very large body of material.

562
01:04:32,150 --> 01:04:36,080
I don't think I would have ever embarked on the life of Mary Shelley if I'd known that.

563
01:04:38,150 --> 01:04:43,370
And I can't think of another literary collection of the 19th century.

564
01:04:43,880 --> 01:04:51,860
Benjamin Disraeli. And, you know, yes, politics as well as literature of a similar size and scope.

565
01:04:54,190 --> 01:04:59,650
So I think our time is now elapsed. Thank you very much indeed for coming along and joining us.

566
01:04:59,890 --> 01:05:07,840
Please do go and see your current exhibition called From Sappho to Suffrage, which is subtitled Women Who Dance.

567
01:05:08,110 --> 01:05:13,009
And you will see some other features of Frankenstein in that exhibition.

568
01:05:13,010 --> 01:05:20,229
And you'll also see we have two great biographies of Ada Lovelace, Byron here, Miranda and Ursula martin.

569
01:05:20,230 --> 01:05:25,420
You will see some pages from the Ada Lovelace Archive.

570
01:05:25,420 --> 01:05:31,090
You'll also see some of Jane Austen manuscripts. It's free to invite all these.

571
01:05:31,090 --> 01:05:32,070
Going to see. Thank you for.