Re-Noted: Mary Shelley's Notes for Frankenstein

"It was on a dreary night of November..."

With Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein set to be released on Netflix this week, I thought it time to revisit the notes behind my absolute favorite monster: Dr. Frankenstein’s creature.

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It all started with a game: Mary Shelley¹ (1797-1851) and her friends gathered on a cold, stormy night² and challenged one another to write ghost stories. There’s a lot of gossip surrounding this circle of friends—their lives were like soap operas. Seriously.

In brief, Mary was traveling with her soon-to-be husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and her step-sister, Claire Clairmont. Claire was in love with the notorious lothario, Lord Byron. In fact, she was secretly pregnant with his child. But, he wanted nothing to do with her. So, Claire convinced Mary and Percy to follow Byron to Switzerland, where he was vacationing at a villa.

Byron was (for lack of a better word) a jerk. He ignored Claire during the day, but slept with her at night.³ She was miserable. Meanwhile, Byron’s companion, Dr. Polidori, fell in love with Mary. When Mary spurned his advances, Polidori jumped off a bridge (he survived). And, to complicate things further, Percy Shelley believed in free love and was probably sleeping with Claire too. Oh, and also, Percy was married to another woman named Harriet. Crazy, right?!⁴

This was the backdrop for the beginnings of Frankenstein. It was in this villa that the group challenged one another to create ghost stories.

Villa Diodati, Byron and Polidori’s rented home, tinted steel engraving from 1833

Later, Mary would claim that the idea of a living corpse came to her in a night-vision. The group had been discussing scientific experiments in galvanism—using electricity to stimulate dead tissue, like a frog’s legs.

Galvani used electricity to animate a dead frog’s legs

Mary went to bed late that night with these ideas in her head. She wrote:

When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me…I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision,—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion…⁵

As Mary wrote Frankenstein, Percy was her primary reader. He offered comments and edits in the margins. And, she accepted almost all of them.

Percy marked up the first draft of Frankenstein. Mary’s writing is lighter. Percy’s marks are the darker marginal comments (as well as some edits inside of the text).

Given how rumors swirled that Percy was Frankenstein’s actual author, I should note that this page is particularly heavy with markings. Most pages look more like the following one—which conveys the epic scene in which Victor Frankenstein creates his monster. Here, we get the first description of the creature who would go on to haunt our literature and films. Mary begins:

It was on a dreary night of November

that I beheld ^{[the frame on whic]} my man compleatted ,. And

with an anxiety that almost amount-

ed 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…

The creature comes to life in Shelley’s draft "Frankenstein, Volume I", in The Shelley-Godwin Archive, MS. Abinger c. 56, 21r.

Percy suggests that Mary describe her monster’s features as “beautiful” rather than “handsome.” He also suggested that she describe the creature’s skin as “yellow” and his hair “of a lustrous black.” The bracketed suggestions belong to Percy:

Great God! His

dun [yellow] skin scarcely covered the work of

muscles and arteries beneath; his hair

was _^ ^{[of a lustrous black &]} flowing and his teeth of a pearly white

ness but these luxuriancies only fomed

formed a more horrid contrast with

his watry eyes that seemed almost of

the same colour as the dun⁶ white

sockets in which they were set…

Clearly, Mary followed her husband’s advice as the version of this scene, published in 1818 attests.

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Revising Frankenstein

Frankenstein was re-issued three times during Mary’s life. And each edition is different. We find Mary writing out revisions in a copy of Frankenstein. Here, she’s extending a section on Frankenstein’s friend, Henry Clerval:

By the time, Mary worked on this new edition, Percy had been dead for years—drowned in a boating accident, just shy of his 30th birthday. In fact, much had changed since Mary first drafted Frankenstein as a teenage girl in Switzerland. Her torrential relationship with Shelley—and the diary they shared—will be the subject of this week’s postscript.

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Notes on Shelley’s Notes:

Challenge your friends to a writing competition: Those were the days, when, in order to entertain one another, friends had to actually come up with original stories! Of course, most of them weren’t great, but I wonder how many more Frankensteins we’d have if it was still common for friends to entertain one another with original stories.

Write out your dreams: Whether or not it’s true, Mary claimed to have come upon her marvelous story through a waking dream—a vision that came to her in bed.

Writing is collaborative: Mary Shelley’s contemporary, William Wordsworth, is often credited with perpetuating the myth of the solitary author. But Shelley’s Frankenstein drafts—and, indeed Wordsworth’s own drafts—demonstrate that most writing is collaborative. Mary Shelley and her friends used notebooks in the way that we use track-changes or Google Docs.

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Noted is fueled by you. Your ❤️’s and comments inspire me. As always, I would love to know your thoughts.

Yours in Note-Taking,

P.S. Paid subscribers, look out for a post on Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s shared diary later this week!

1. She wasn’t yet married to Percy Bysshe Shelley, so her name at this time was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.

2. Although it was summer, volcanic activity had darkened the skies making 1816 “the year without summer.” For more on the material surrounding Frankenstein’s creation, see Denlinger, Elizabeth Campbell. It’s Alive!: A Visual History of Frankenstein. The Morgan Library Museum, 2018.

3. In a letter to a friend, Byron wrote: “If a girl eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours of the night—there is but one way…”

4. Read more about this in Charlotte Gordon’s Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft & Mary Shelley, 2016. See also Daisy Hay’s Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron, and Other Tangled Lives, 2010.

5. Shelley’s preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein. Scholars question if this is really how the events happened. After all, Mary wrote this preface fifteen years after the events. She was under financial pressure and her authorship (because she was a woman) was socially unsettling. This is Charlotte Gordon’s explanation:

If Mary could improve her sales and her reputation by being self-effacing, then it made sense to distance herself from the novel’s inception and say that she had not consciously created the story, that she was neither a genius nor particularly talented. (Romantic Outlaws, p. 188)

6. Dun = of a dull grayish-brown color.