Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
a suitable plot until the evening when the others were discussing the lat-
est experiments allegedly conducted by Erasmus Darwin whereby he was
said to have “preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case till by some
extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion. Not thus,
after all, would life be given. Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated; gal-
vanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a
creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital
warmth” (Shelley 1996, pp. 171f.). That night Mary allegedly dreamed
the central scene of her novel. Doctor Darwin has been transformed into
“the pale student of unhallowed arts, kneeling beside the thing he had put
together” (Shelley 1996, p. 172). This suggests that the very attempt to
create life was already associated, at least in Mary's subconscious mind
as accessed by her dream, with alchemy, the “unhallowed arts”, with the
demonic and the horrific. The problem of finding a subject for her story
was instantly solved: “What terrified me will terrify others; and I need
only describe the specter which had haunted my midnight pillow. […]
making a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream.” (Shelley
1996, p. 172)
4
4
In her Introduction to a recent edition of
Frankenstein
, Marilyn Butler has pointed
out that the original (1818) edition of the novel carried no such moral implications.
The scientific references were to the celebrated public debate of 1814-1819 carried
on between John Abernethy and William Lawrence, two professors at London's
Royal College of Surgeons, on the origins and nature of life. Abernethy rejected ma-
terialist explanations and opted for an added force, “some subtile, mobile, invisible
substance” analogous equally to the soul and to electricity. Lawrence, who was Percy
Shelley's physician, put forward the materialist position as being the only intellectu-
ally respectable one. His views had considerable influence on both Mary and Percy
Shelley and his aggressive materialism was strongly represented in the first edition of
Frankenstein. It seems certain that the discussion between Percy Shelley and Byron
later described by Mary in her Introduction of 1831 was concerned with the vitalist
debate and Butler further suggests that the Frankenstein of the first edition, the blun-
dering scientist attempting to infuse life by means of an electric spark, is a contemp-
tuous portrait of Abernethy while the unhealthy relationships of the aristocratic Fran-
kenstein family recall Lawrence's research on heredity and sexual selection. When
Lawrence's
Lectures on Physiology, Zoology and the Natural History of Man
elicited
a virulent review in the influential
Quarterly Review
of November 1819 and Law-
rence himself was suspended from the Royal College of Surgeons until he agreed to
withdraw his topic, Mary Shelley feared the same fate would befall
Frankenstein
.
She therefore revised it extensively in 1831, removing all controversial references,
adding suitably remorseful statements by Frankenstein and, of course, the Introduc-
tion with its indication that we should read the novel as a frightful “human endeavour
