Frankenstein authorship question

The Frankenstein authorship question refers to the historical uncertainty that exists around Percy Bysshe Shelley's contributions to Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, a novel attributed to Shelley's wife, Mary Shelley.

Percy Bysshe Shelley's 1816 poem "Mutability" in a draft of Frankenstein with his changes to the text in his handwriting. Bodleian. Oxford.

Author Duncan Wu claims the uncertainty ended with the publication of transcribed manuscripts in 1996 which he says make it evident that Mary Shelley was the creative force behind the work, while Percy Shelley provided contributions which were editorial in nature. Advocates who continue to maintain that Percy Shelley had a much greater role – even the majority role – in the creation of the text have been dismissed by some mainstream scholars.[1]

Background

The dispute over authorship began as soon as the novel was published anonymously on January 1, 1818 in London. There was much speculation and controversy over the actual author of the book.[2][3] Percy Bysshe Shelley was suspected as the author but he denied any role whatsoever in the writing of the book. He claimed that he only supervised the manuscript during its publication.

The novel was first attributed to Percy Bysshe Shelley in an 1818 review by Walter Scott who recognized Shelley's style and ideas in the Preface and noticed Shelley's poem "Mutability" and poetry passages and citations in the book.[4][5] Percy Shelley had written the Preface "Mutability". He also selected poetry passages such as the John Milton epigraph. However, these facts were not known at the time. Scott concluded that it was "an extraordinary tale, in which the author seems to us to disclose uncommon powers of poetic imagination".

The next public challenge to Mary Shelley's authorship came in 1824. She had written a follow-up novel that was reviewed in Charles Knight's literary magazine called Knight's Quarterly Review. In the section titled "Frankenstein", the reviewer alleged that the follow-up novel and Frankenstein were written by two different authors:[6]

"[T]here is not the slightest trace of the same hand -- instead of the rapidity and enthusiastic energy which hurries you forward in Frankenstein, every thing is cold, crude, inconsecutive, and wearisome; -- not one flash of imagination, not one spark of passion -- opening it as I did, with eager expectation, it must indeed have been bad for me after toiling a week to send the book back without having finished the first volume. This induced me to read Frankenstein again -- for I thought I must have been strangely mistaken in my original judgment. So far, however, from this, a second reading has confirmed it. I think Frankenstein possesses extreme power, and displays capabilities such as I did hope would have produced far different things from Castruccio. ... But whence arises the extreme inferiority of Valperga? I can account for it only by supposing that Shelley wrote the first, though it was attributed to his wife, -- and that she really wrote the last. … It has much of his poetry and vigour … At all events, the difference of the two books is very remarkable."

An author for the novel was first given in the 1821 second overall edition: The French translation was published in Paris by Aléxandre Corréard as Frankenstein, ou le Prométhée moderne by Jules Saladin with the author attributed as being "M.me Shelly". The second (English) edition was published two years later in 1823. It was published in London by G. and W.B. Whittaker. The publication came under the supervision of William Godwin, who is Mary Shelley's father. Godwin listed the author as "Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley". He made "114 substantive changes" to the 1818 edition. He decided to not credit Percy Bysshe Shelley as the author of the Preface. Godwin also did not cite Percy Shelley as the author of the poem "Mutability" which gave implications that Mary Shelley was the author of the poem. He also removed the John Milton epigraph from Paradise Lost. Godwin failed to credit Percy Shelly for his textual contributions.[7]

In the 1831 edition published by Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley in London, Mary acknowledged for the first time that Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote the preface. This third edition was a heavily revised version of the 1818 original that significantly and substantially altered the novel.

The authorship issue was revived in 1974 when drafts and proofs of the novel revealed that some sections were written in Percy Bysshe Shelley's handwriting. James Rieger, an English professor and editor, in a publication of the original 1818 edition in 1974, republished in 1982, argued that Shelley made significant contributions to the novel and should be regarded at least as a "minor collaborator" or even as a collaborator: "His assistance at every point in the book's manufacture was so extensive that one hardly knows whether to regard him as editor or minor collaborator. ... Percy Bysshe Shelley worked on Frankenstein at every stage, from the earliest drafts through the printer's proofs, with Mary's final 'carte blanche to make what alterations you please.' ... We know that he was more than an editor. Should we grant him the status of minor collaborator?"[8] He claimed that Shelley was intricately and minutely involved in the composition of the novel from the outset.

English professor Charles E. Robinson placed Shelley's name on a 2008 edition of the book The Original Frankenstein which caused widespread media comment and discussion.[9] In 2015, in The Neglected Shelley, Robinson examined Shelley's alleged significant contributions to the novel in greater detail.

Chronology
Percy Bysshe Shelley's edits, additions, and emendations in a draft of Frankenstein in darker ink in his handwriting. Bodleian. Oxford.

Authors have examined and investigated Percy Bysshe Shelley's scientific knowledge and experimentation, his two Gothic horror novels published in 1810 and 1811, his atheistic worldview, his antipathy to church and state, his 1818 Preface to Frankenstein, and his connection to the secret anti-Catholic organization, the Illuminati. These revelations showed that the novel drew inspiration from Shelley's life, background, his readings such as John Milton's Paradise Lost, Ruins of Empires (1791) by Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney, which also informed "Ozymandias", also published in 1818, Sir Humphry Davy's Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1812), a textbook which Percy Bysshe Shelley owned,[10] and the works of Dr. Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, whom Shelley had earlier cited as a major influence in Queen Mab (1813), his views on religion, his poetic style, and his themes and ideas. In letters to William Godwin, Shelley also mentioned his affinity for Paracelsus, Albertus Magnus, and Heinrich Agrippa, "some of the physiological writers of Germany" cited in his 1818 Preface to Frankenstein.[11][12] Based on its science, style, imagery, poetry, and language, some commentators have concluded that the novel's authorship is more likely Percy's rather than Mary's, though this interpretation is far from universal.

These arguments have been disputed as being mere coincidences. Leslie S. Klinger, in The New Annotated Frankenstein (2017), argued it is spurious to maintain "that the biographical coincidences of Victor Frankenstein and Percy Shelley are evidence of Percy's authorship". Instead, critics rely on the handwriting evidence and Mary's statements in the 1831 Introduction to the novel.[13]

Proponents of Percy Shelley's authorship such as Scott de Hart and Joseph P. Farrell claim that he was obsessed with electricity, galvanism, and the reanimation of corpses, and point to the influence of James Lind, Percy Shelley's former teacher at Eton College. Advocates of Percy Shelley's authorship also point out that the novel contains his poetry such as "Mutability" as well as poetry by others, that the novel was imbued with the themes of atheism, social tolerance, social justice, reform, and antipathy to monarchism that only he advocated, and that there were noticeable motifs and subjects in the novel which only he espoused, such as vegetarianism, pantheism, alchemy, incest, male friendship, and scientific discovery.

However, editor Marilyn Butler, in her introduction and explanatory notes to the Oxford Press "1818 Text" edition of the novel, attributes these apparent coincidences to Percy's admiration and emulation of Mary's father, novelist William Godwin, whose works share numerous similarities in style, ideology, and subject matter with the novels of both Percy and Mary.

English literature scholars Phyllis Zimmerman, Phillip Wade,[14] Stephen C. Behrendt,[15] and Johnathan Glance[16] compared the two early Shelley Gothic horror novels Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvyne (1811) with Frankenstein and found them to be precursors of the latter novel, containing the same or similar ideas, themes, structure, plot, and characters. Zastrozzi is a novel of pursuit and revenge where an atheist antagonist seeks to destroy his victim and his progeny. He can kill his victim at any time, but instead seeks to torture and slowly kill his victim by destroying and killing everything he loves. In St. Irvyne, the plot centers around an alchemist, Ginotti, who has a lifelong goal to find the secret of life by the study of "natural philosophy", to attain immortality. It is also a plot of pursuit where the alchemist seeks to impart the secret of eternal life to Wolfstein, the protagonist. There is even a poem in St. Irvyne on the reanimation of a corpse, the nun Rosa. Both novels rely extensively on John Milton's Paradise Lost, containing epigraphs like in Frankenstein, and contain poetry intertwined throughout the novel, a distinctive feature of Frankenstein as well. These novels were also published anonymously.

Other authors have noted that Percy Shelley did not originate the aforementioned ideas, themes, structure, plots or character types. As Marilyn Butler observes in her introduction and notes to the "1818 Text" edition, Percy admired and sought approbation from Mary's famous father, in whose works can be seen numerous similarities with both "Frankenstein" and Percy's above-listed novels. Among these similarities are: tragic action narrated in the first person by an isolated intellectual ("Fleetwood" and "Caleb Williams"); enmity between two powerful characters with antithetical ideologies who pursue each other in a complex and shifting chase ("Mandeville" and Caleb Williams); and the story of a selfish intellectual who trades domestic happiness and marital love for scientific knowledge, success and power ("St. Leon"). It is arguable, therefore, that any similarities between Percy's novels and Frankenstein can be attributed to Percy's emulation of Godwin rather than his supposed authorship of his wife's novel.

In 1996, Charles E. Robinson published a transcribed edition of the Frankenstein manuscripts together with a chronology of the work's composition.[1] From these it is possible to see that Percy Shelley's contribution to the novel is of between 5,000-6,000 words of the novel's 72,000 word total.[1] Robinson wrote that from the manuscripts it was evident that Mary Shelley was the "creative genius" behind the work, while Percy's contribution was akin to that which a publisher's editor would provide.[1]

References
  1. Duncan Wu (2015). 30 Great Myths about the Romantics. WIley-Blackwell. p. 214. ISBN 978-1118843260.
  2. Zimmerman, Phyllis. Shelley's Fiction. Los Angeles, CA: Darami Press, 1998, p. 101.
  3. Review: The Literary Panorama, and National Register, N.S., 8 (1 June 1818): 411-414. "We have heard that this work is written by Mr. Shelley."
  4. Scott, Walter. "Remarks on Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus; A Novel", Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Issue XII, Volume II, (March, 1818), pp. 613-20.
  5. Blackwood's Edinburgh Review, Issue XII, Volume II, March, 1818, p. 613.
  6. “Frankenstein’’, Knight's Quarterly Review, 3 (August, 1824), edited by Charles Knight: 195-99.
  7. Murray, E.B. (December 1981). "Changes in the 1823 Edition of Frankenstein". The Library. 6. Oxford University Press. 3 (4): 320–327. doi:10.1093/library/s6-III.4.320.
  8. Rieger, James. Edited, with variant readings, an Introduction, and, Notes by. Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
  9. Rosner, Victoria. "Co-Creating a Monster." The Huffington Post, 29 September 2009. "Random House recently published a new edition of the novel Frankenstein with a surprising change: Mary Shelley is no longer identified as the novel's sole author. Instead, the cover reads 'Mary Shelley (with Percy Shelley).'"
  10. Sir Humphry Davy. "Percy Shelley owned a copy of Davy's textbook, Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1812) and it is probable that he and Mary studied it together, again in the autumn of 1816, at the time when she was working on Frankenstein."
  11. "Odd Truths: The Occult Secrets of Percy Shelley", The Thinker's Garden, December 23, 2015. Retrieved 19 May, 2018.
  12. 1818 Preface to Frankenstein, written by Percy Bysshe Shelley, but not revealed or acknowledged until 1831.
  13. Klinger, Leslie S., editor. The New Annotated Frankenstein. New York: Liveright, 2017.
  14. Wade, Phillip. "Shelley and the Miltonic Element in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein." Milton and the Romantics, 2 (December 1976), 23-25. A scene from Zastrozzi is re-invoked in Frankenstein.
  15. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne. Edited by Stephen C. Behrendt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 59.
  16. Glance, Jonathan. (1996). "'Beyond the Usual Bounds of Reverie'? Another Look at the Dreams in Frankenstein." Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 7.4: 30–47.

Bibliography
  • Adams, Stephen. "Percy Bysshe Shelley helped wife Mary write Frankenstein, claims professor: Mary Shelley received extensive help in writing Frankenstein from her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, a leading academic has claimed." Telegraph, 24 August 2008. Charles E. Robinson: "He made very significant changes in words, themes and style. The book should now be credited as 'by Mary Shelley with Percy Shelley'."
  • Chapin, Lisbeth. "Shelley's Great Chain of Being: From 'blind worms' to 'new-fledged eagles'" in Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Culture: Representation, Hybridity, Ethics, edited by Frank Palmeri. Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2006. The animal most cited in Percy Bysshe Shelley's works is the worm. The dominant symbolic image for death in Frankenstein is the worm.
  • Goulding, Christopher. (2002). "The real Doctor Frankenstein?" Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 95(5): 257-9. Christopher Goulding: "My thesis is that she [Mary Shelley] got what science she knew from Percy Shelley."
  • de Hart, Scott D. Shelley Unbound: Discovering Frankenstein's True Creator. Foreword by Joseph P. Farrell. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2013.
  • de Hart, Scott D. and Joseph P. Farrell. Transhumanism: A Grimoire of Alchemical Agendas. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2012.
  • Grande, James. "The Original Frankenstein, By Mary Shelley with Percy Shelley ed Charles E Robinson. To what extent did Percy Bysshe Shelley work on 'Frankenstein'? A new analysis reveals all." 16 November 2008, The Independent. Retrieved 30 September 2018.
  • Huet, Marie Hélène. Monstrous Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
  • King-Hele Desmond. (1967). "Shelley and Dr Lind." Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin, 18: 1-6.
  • Lauritsen, John. The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein. Dorchester, MA: Pagan Press, 2007.
  • Lauritsen, John. (Spring 2007). "Debunking the Mary Shelley Legend", Gay & Lesbian Humanist.
  • Lauritsen, John. (June, 2018). "The Real Frankenstein and Its Author", Mensa Bulletin: The Magazine of American Mensa, 24-25.
  • Lauritsen, John. (October, 2018). "The True Author of Frankenstein", Academic Questions, 1-8.
  • Murray, E.B. (1978). "Shelley's Contribution to Mary's Frankenstein," Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin, 29, 50-68.
  • Murray-Fennell, Michael. "Did Mary Shelley really write Frankenstein?", Country Life, May 7, 2017.
  • Owchar, Nick. "The Siren's Call: An epic poet as Mary Shelley's co-author. A new edition of 'Frankenstein' shows the contributions of her husband, Percy." Los Angeles Times, 11 October 2009.
  • Paglia, Camille (March 14, 2007). "Mary Shelley debunked." Salon. Retrieved 20 April 2018.
  • Rhodes, Jerry. "New paperback by UD professor offers two versions of Frankenstein tale." UDaily, University of Delaware, 30 September 2009. Charles E. Robinson: "These italics used for Percy Shelley's words make even more visible the half-dozen or so places where, in his own voice, he made substantial additions to the 'draft' of Frankenstein."
  • Rieger, James. Edited, with variant readings, an Introduction, and, Notes by. Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
  • Rieger, James. "Dr. Polidori and the Genesis of Frankenstein." SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 3 (Winter 1963), 461-72.
  • Robinson, Charles E., ed. The Original Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (with Percy Bysshe Shelley). New York: Vintage Books, 2008.
  • Robinson, Charles E. "Percy Bysshe Shelley's Text(s) in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein", in The Neglected Shelley edited by Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb. London and New York: Routledge, 2015, pp. 117–136.
  • Robinson, Charles E. "Frankenstein: Its Composition and Publication" in The Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein edited by Andrew Smith. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016, p. 16.
  • Rosner, Victoria. "Co-Creating a Monster." The Huffington Post, 29 September 2009. "Random House recently published a new edition of the novel Frankenstein with a surprising change: Mary Shelley is no longer identified as the novel's sole author. Instead, the cover reads 'Mary Shelley (with Percy Shelley).'"
  • "Scot's monster role played up". BBC News, May 1, 2002. "[Mary] Shelley: Knew little of science". Christopher Goulding: "[W]e might now give some credit to the time spent six years previously by her husband-to-be in the study of a retired Scots physician in Windsor."
  • Shelley, Mary, with Percy Shelley. The Original Frankenstein. Edited and with an Introduction by Charles E. Robinson. Oxford: The Bodleian Library, 2008. ISBN 978-1-85124-396-9
  • Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "Reviews: On 'Frankenstein'." The Athenaeum, London, Sunday, November 10, 1832., No. 263, page 730.
  • Wade, Phillip. "Shelley and the Miltonic Element in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein." Milton and the Romantics, 2 (December 1976), 23-25. A scene from Zastrozzi is re-invoked in Frankenstein.
  • Zimmerman, Phyllis. Shelley's Fiction. Los Angeles, CA: Darami Press, 1998.
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