The Monsters Read online

  Copyright © 2006 by Dorothy Hoobler and Thomas Hoobler

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  First eBook Edition: May 2006

  ISBN: 978-0-316-07572-5

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  CONCEPTION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHAPTER ONE: LOVE BETWEEN EQUALS

  CHAPTER TWO: “NOBODY’S LITTLE GIRL BUT PAPA’S”

  CHAPTER THREE: IN LOVE WITH LOVING

  CHAPTER FOUR: CRACKLING SPARKS AND FREE LOVE

  CHAPTER FIVE: THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN EUROPE

  CHAPTER SIX: THE SUMMER OF DARKNESS

  CHAPTER SEVEN: “A HIDEOUS PHANTOM”

  CHAPTER EIGHT: “I SHALL BE NO MORE . . .”

  CHAPTER NINE: THE GHOSTS’ REVENGE

  CHAPTER TEN: A DOSE FOR POOR POLIDORI

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE LITTLEST VICTIM

  CHAPTER TWELVE: THE HATEFUL HOUSE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: GLORY AND DEATH

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: MARY ALONE

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Also by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler

  Nonfiction

  Captain John Smith: Jamestown and the Birth of the American Dream

  Vanity Rules: A History of American Fashion and Beauty

  We Are Americans: Voices of the Immigrant Experience

  Vietnam: Why We Fought

  The Voyages of Captain Cook

  The Trenches: Fighting on the Western Front in World War I

  Photographing History

  Photographing the Frontier

  The Chinese American Family Album

  The Italian American Family Album

  The Irish American Family Album

  The Jewish American Family Album

  The African American Family Album

  The Mexican American Family Album

  The Japanese American Family Album

  The Scandinavian American Family Album

  The German American Family Album

  The Cuban American Family Album

  Novels

  The Ghost in the Tokaido Inn

  The Demon in the Teahouse

  In Darkness, Death(Edgar Award winner)

  The Sword That Cut the Burning Grass

  CONCEPTION

  IT ACTUALLY WAS a dark and stormy night. All through that chilly summer of 1816, ominous gray clouds had swept across the skies, bringing fierce thunderstorms to much of Europe and North America. Earlier in the year, astronomers had seen unusual sunspots through their telescopes. By June, the spots were plainly visible, and people began to fear that they were portents of doom. A pamphlet that was passed from hand to hand in Paris warned that the end of the world was near. In some parts of Europe and New England, snow fell in July. It would long be remembered as a year when summer never came.

  So it was that a violent thunderstorm was raging on a frigid June night as five young people gathered inside the Villa Diodati, a luxurious summerhouse on the southern shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. One of the group would have been instantly recognizable to most people in Europe or America. His imposing profile aroused the envy of young men, who obsessively imitated his clothes and hairstyle, and the secret admiration of young women, who had heard it whispered (in the words of Lady Caroline Lamb, his onetime lover) that Lord Byron was “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” And in fact Byron had fled here to escape the scandal caused by the allegation that he had committed incest with his half-sister Augusta—a rumor that had caused Byron’s young wife to leave him.

  Though only twenty-eight, Byron was already the most famous English poet of the time—an era when writing verse was the equivalent of playing in a rock band today. Two years earlier, some ten thousand copies of Byron’s book-length poem, The Corsair, had been sold the day it was published, and it went through seven printings in the following month, a record that has probably never been equaled for a book of verse.

  At least two of the other members of the group assembled in his villa were also poets, though neither had anything like the reputation that Byron did. One was Byron’s companion, the brilliant Dr. John Polidori, who had graduated from the medical school of the University of Edinburgh two years before at the tender age of nineteen. Polidori would have gladly given up his medical career for poetry, but Byron mocked Polidori’s artistic efforts and made the earnest young man the butt of jokes. The third youthful poet in the room, however, had done what few men—and no women—had been able to do: earn Byron’s respect as an intellectual equal. This was Percy Bysshe Shelley, age twenty-three, whose work was then known only to a small circle of literary friends. In contrast to the dark, brooding, cynical Byron, Shelley was angel-faced, blond, and ethereal. He felt he could change the world through the power of his words, despite the fact that the world had so far shown virtually complete indifference to his efforts.

  The two women in the room were both in their teens. One was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who had become Shelley’s lover two years earlier despite the inconvenient fact that he had been (and still was) married to someone else. Mary’s parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, two of the most famous radicals of their time, had condemned marriage as a form of prostitution. Nevertheless, Godwin regarded it as a betrayal when his sixteen-year-old daughter ran off with Shelley, a man who had declared himself Godwin’s disciple. Mary hoped to placate Godwin by writing some great work that would prove her worthy of being not only his child, but also the child of the famous mother who had died giving birth to her. Thus far, Mary had not found a subject that would justify that sacrifice.

  The last person in the circle was Mary’s stepsister, the beautiful and seductive eighteen-year-old Claire Clairmont (as she currently called herself), the catalyst who had brought the group together. In the spring of 1816 she had boldly written Byron to request a meeting at his London townhouse. Though he received countless such appeals from young women, Byron was touched by Claire’s declaration that her future was in his hands and “the Creator ought not to destroy his creature.” That sparked a sexual tryst which resulted in less abstract creative activity: as the five listened to the thunderstorm raging outside, only Claire was aware that she was now carrying Byron’s child.

  To entertain his guests on that rainy summer evening, Byron opened a volume of German horror stories translated into French, and began to read aloud from it. Flickering candles and burning logs in the fireplace provided the only light, other than the flashes of lightning that abruptly illuminated the windows. Byron liked to frighten people, and as the others became increasingly agitated by the jarring crashes of thunder and the howling of the wind outside, his enjoyment increased. Upon finishing, Byron closed the book and proposed a contest: each of them would try to write a ghost story. He could hardly have imagined that his challenge would result in a novel that was destined to become more famous than his own work or that Mary Godwin, eventually to be known as Mary Shelley, would be the author.

  Mary’s novel Frankenstein first appeared in print two years later. It immediately attracted readers, soon appeared in a stage production, and has retained its hold on people’s imaginations for almost two centuries. The novel has been translated not only into other languages but also other forms—stage, movies, television, comic books, breakfast cereals. The 1931 motion picture versio
n of the tale made Dr. Frankenstein and his creation famous throughout the world, and for many, the movie’s star Boris Karloff provided the truest image of the creature that sprang from Mary’s imagination that summer.

  A second modern myth was born that evening: the story of a creature (also resembling a human) whose fame rivals Mary’s monster. As a result of Byron’s challenge, Dr. Polidori wrote The Vampyre, the first and most influential novel about a human vampire; it was the model for all subsequent authors in the genre, from Bram Stoker to Anne Rice. Everyone at Byron’s villa that night would have recognized the person Polidori portrayed. The aristocratic vampire who preys on the lifeblood of others was undoubtedly Byron himself.

  A dark star hung over all the brilliant young people who listened to Byron read horror stories that night. Though their futures seemed limitless, early deaths or stunted lives awaited each of them. It almost might be said that the writing of Frankenstein placed a curse on the lives of those who were present at its birth. Only Mary and her stepsister survived for long, bearing the heavy memory of those with whom they had shared a unique moment that produced two masterpieces of the imagination.

  Our book concerns the creation of monsters, literary and human, and the tragic consequences of those generative acts. We will delve into the wellsprings of inspiration that produced the works of literature that were begun at Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816 and try to discover the relationship between the creators and their creations. In the process, we hope to reveal the name of the nameless monster that has fascinated readers and audiences ever since.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  We are indebted to the many scholars who have paved the way for us by assembling the letters and journals of the subjects of our book. To Betty T. Bennett, Paula R. Feldman, W. Clark Durant, Frederick L. Jones, Ernest J. Lovell, Jr., Leslie A. Marchand, Diana Scott-Kilvert, Marion Kingston Stocking, and Ralph M. Wardle—thank you for the work that will forever benefit all who study Mary Shelley and those who influenced her.

  Thanks also to those who personally helped us with advice and information, including Stephen Wagner, curator of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at the New York Public Library; Dr. Murray C. T. Simpson of the National Library of Scotland; Haidee Jackson, curator at Newstead Abbey; Virginia Murray of the John Murray Archive; and Martin Mintz and Sandra Powlette of the British Library. We appreciate the help we received from the staff of the New York Public Library’s Map Division, who found us a detailed map of London at the time the Godwin family was living on Skinner Street. As always, we are grateful for the help of the staff of the Deborah, Jonathan F. P., Samuel Priest, and Adam Raphael Rose Reading Room of the New York Public Library; the staff of the Elmer Bobst Library of New York University; and to the staff of the Cohen Stacks of the City University of New York for pointing the way to a scarce and important volume.

  Special thanks to Dr. Stephen Lomazow, world’s greatest magazine collector, for lending us his copy of the September 1818 issue of The Port Folio, which contained the first American notice of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

  We would be remiss if we did not acknowledge gratefully the heroic and skillful efforts of Little, Brown editor Geoff Shandler and copyeditor Jen Noon to improve our manuscript, and we thank Al Zuckerman, our agent, for his support and hard work on our behalf. Our daughter Ellen, who was not yet born when we published our first book, is now a doctoral candidate at Columbia University who critiqued this manuscript for scholarship and style. Any mistakes, of course, are all ours.

  CHAPTER ONE

  LOVE BETWEEN EQUALS

  Mary moves in soft beauty and conscious delight,

  To augment with sweet smiles all the joys of the night,

  Nor once blushes to own the rest of the fair

  That sweet love and beauty are worthy our care.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  And thine is a face of sweet love in despair,

  And thine is a face of mild sorrow and care,

  And thine is a face of wild terror and fear

  That shall never be quiet till laid on its bier.

  —“Mary,” William Blake, c. 1801-1803

  THIS STORY BEGINS, as many tales do, with a love affair. It involved two brilliant yet very odd people who seemed utterly unsuited for each other. William Godwin was painfully shy, given to intellectualizing, and apparently a virgin at the age of forty, when he fell in love with Mary Wollstonecraft. She was passionate to the point of recklessness, heedless of the opinions of the world, and insistent that she never take second place to anyone, male or female. What brought them together was their common interest: revolution.

  If the term “radical chic” had been current in the late eighteenth century, Mary and William would have been its personification, for they were the idols of a generation of young people who wanted to overturn the existing order. Both of them had been inspired by the French Revolution, which broke out in 1789 and promised a complete transformation of society. Wollstonecraft had stunned the British public in 1792 with the publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (note the singular), which grew out of her defense of the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man. In those days, no one had previously thought it “sexist” to use the word man as a synonym for the human race; Wollstonecraft boldly spoke for half of all humanity, who desired their rights too.

  A sample of the tart opinions expressed by the woman who is often called the first feminist:

  My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. . . . I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity . . . will soon become objects of contempt.

  Another: “A mistaken education, a narrow uncultivated mind, and many sexual prejudices, tend to make women more constant than men.” Also: “An unhappy marriage is often very advantageous to a family, and . . . the neglected wife is, in general, the best mother.” Finally: “It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are, in some degree, independent of men; nay, it is vain to expect that strength of natural affection, which would make them good wives and mothers. Whilst they are absolutely dependent on their husbands they will be cunning, mean, and selfish.”

  These were revolutionary ideas in an age when women were the legal property of their fathers and husbands. Horace Walpole, the Earl of Orford, otherwise famous for writing the first Gothic novel, expressed the verdict of England’s upper classes when he called Wollstonecraft a “hyena in petticoats.”

  Wollstonecraft’s future husband, though timid and withdrawn in person, threw off his reticence in his writing. In his most famous work, Political Justice (1793), Godwin set out to describe the social conditions under which the human race could achieve perfection. Though the excesses of the French Revolution had aroused deep fears among the English upper class, Godwin declared that “monarchy was a species of government unavoidably corrupt.” But he went farther, much farther, claiming that all governments by their very nature stood in the way of the improvement of the human condition. Godwin believed that it would only be through the power of reason, not coercion or force, that society would be transformed. The publication of his book made him one of the most famous people in England, and for a time he was idolized by young people who were swept away by his vision of perfecting society. Freud wrote that every person has a “family romance,” a narrative that explains the different relations of their life. Mary Shelley, the daughter of these two famous radicals, would be haunted by their love story and would use it (and her own life) as the narrative for much of her literary work.

  For Mary Wollstonecraft, to borrow another phrase from the 1970s,
the personal was the political, and all her writings used her own experiences to illuminate her ideas. Mary had tempestuous relationships, for she was a mercurial person who could be by turns passionate, domineering, needy, or depressed. Her life resembled a story from the literature of her time—the angst of Rousseau’s Julie: La Nouvelle Héloïse or the melodrama of Goethe’s international best-seller The Sorrows of Young Werther. She was a woman of contradictions who took actions that often seemed at odds with her own radical philosophy. Hard as a diamond, if tapped the wrong way she could shatter. As she wrote when she was thirty-eight, “There is certainly an original defect in my mind, for the cruelest experience will not eradicate the foolish tendency I have to cherish, and to expect to meet with, romantic tenderness.” Few have carried that “defect” as far as Mary Wollstonecraft.

  She was born in London on April 27, 1759, a year of military victories for the English that won them Canada and India, making England the most powerful nation on earth. At home, Englishmen were finding new wealth from the heightened economic activity called the Industrial Revolution. Wollstonecraft’s grandfather had earned a fortune as a master weaver and supplier of cloth to the growing textile industry. His son, Mary’s father, heir to two-thirds of the fortune, was a big spender, heavy drinker, and a man of violent temper. According to Godwin, Mary recalled that her mother was “the first and most submissive of his subjects.”

  Mary had the kind of childhood that could either crush a spirit or rouse it to greatness. The second of six children, she resented the favoritism shown toward her brother Ned, two years older than herself. Ned’s position as the family’s golden child was quite literal, for in his grandfather’s will, he had inherited the other one-third of the estate. Money was not what Mary craved, however. She envied the attention and warmth that her mother, Elizabeth Dickson, bestowed on Ned. A significant factor in Mary’s sibling rivalry was the fact that her mother had breast-fed Ned, while a wet nurse was hired to nourish baby Mary. It isn’t clear how she knew of her deprived condition, but once she did know she considered it a profound fact. As she later wrote, a mother’s “parental affection . . . scarcely deserved the name, when it does not lead her to suckle her children.”