Romantic Circles Reviews

Reviewed by
Judith Barbour
University of Sydney

There is no denying the dramatic interest and thematic pertinence to the fictional writings of William Godwin and Mary Shelley of the metaphor of the “mental anatomy” (Introduction 15–17 and passim), which gives the title to William D. Brewer’s critical monograph, and contours its extended comparison of this father-and-daughter pair of authors. An anatomy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (in the old form of the word “an atomie”) is a violent delapidation of an organic unity. In the primitive conditions of hospitals and morgues contemporary with the Godwin-Shelley writers, only cadavers could be anatomized and made intelligible, dissected and made visible, the veins, nerves, and musculature traced, flayed, and probed. The metonym of the eye—its “terrible aspect”—is hegemonic in Enlightenment cultural politics. In one pathetic instance, the dead foetus, or as it was officially called the abortion, could by now be anatomized in situ in the dead gravid uterus, as the “naturalistic” optics and perspective machines of graphic artists gave the burgeoning male profession of scientific obstetrics its first breakthrough. Incidentally, “abortion” was one of the key words inserted by Percy Bysshe Shelley into the manuscript-in-the making of his pregnant lover’s and soon-to-be-wife’s Frankenstein (1818).

The leading terms of Brewer’s discussion—psychological exploration, analysis of the workings of the mind, delineation of ruling passions—are announced at the start in Godwin’s pithy declaration: “The thing in which my imagination revelled the most freely, was the analysis of the private and internal operations of the mind, employing my metaphysical dissecting knife in tracing and laying bare the involutions of motive” (qtd. in Brewer 15). This, Brewer writes, is Godwin’s “account of the composition of Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794)”; and he adduces the examples of dramatist Joanna Baillie and novelist Mary Hays, “a disciple of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft,” whose writings in the 1790s devled into human passion and prejudice, the “power of the human mind,” and the “springs which set it in motion” (Brewer 15, quoting Hays in 1796).

Enter a caveat, pointing out that Godwin wrote his account of the imaginative jouissance that had shaped Caleb Williams, and distinguished between his own creative purposes in fiction and the then prevailing canons of novelistic realism, not in 1794, but in 1832. In hindsight, Godwin can perceive the connections between minute psychological operations, and literary authority and moral significance. The 1794 debut of Caleb Williams into the London of the Treason Trials, gripped by wartime paranoia and state repression, carries forward a history of “the private and internal operations of the mind” into the sphere of public morality and national governance. In this re-weighting of the gravitas of private conscience and self-knowledge, Godwin rejoins at the close of his career a movement, sponsored at first by women writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, to challenge the rigidity of their exclusion from the public intellectual sphere, and moreover to redefine the formative importance of such so-called private matters as sexuality, labor, childhood education, and parenting.

A manuscript fragment was drafted by Mary Shelley in late 1836 when she was starting to compose a memoir of her late father. While she concedes that “pot-boiler” hack writing was often forced on Godwin by the need for a livelihood, Mary Shelley claims that even his earliest writings show gleams of his later mastery of psychological fiction, what Mark Philp, in his editorial introduction to the Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, terms Godwin’s unfolding of “an alternative history, the history of mentalities” (1.42). Of his apprentice sermons from the dissenter pulpits at Ware and Stowmarket, hastily got up for publication in 1783, she writes:

The Sermons are entitled Sketches of History . . . . They are peculiar from displaying that tendency to dive into & anatomize the human heart, which is so principal a feature in all Mr Godwins writings – & also by that lofty conception of the excellence of human nature which led him to consider its absolute perfection no dream of the imagination . . . he had a firm faith in the powers inherent in Man to raise himself to heroism & surpassing excellence.[1]

Demonstrably, Mary Shelley in 1836 is echoing Godwin’s self-analysis in 1832, his “metaphysical dissecting knife” “displaying that tendency to dive into & anatomize the human heart.” Brewer quite rightly emphasizes the rhetoric of anatomy as a master light of Godwin’s seeing and of Mary Shelley’s reading of him. But he passes over Mary Shelley’s idealizing of Godwin’s novels, her attribution to him of a “firm faith,” irrespective of his probing analytic powers. In her youth, Mary Shelley read Godwin’s work in the afterlight of Mary Wollstonecraft’s death, and Godwin in old age read his own work in the reflected light of his daughter’s mollifying vision. A spate of writing from both Godwin and Mary, between 1816 and 1818, coincided with traumatic life events: Mary’s half-sister Fanny Imlay’s suicide; Mary’s marriage to the poet P. B. Shelley after his first wife’s violent death; and the death of the Irish barrister and defender of civil liberties, John Philpot Curran, who is the dedicatee of Godwin’s novel Mandeville (1817), written in the heat of Godwin’s reading of the pre-publication manuscript of Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus, while Frankenstein itself is dedicated to “the Author of Caleb Williams.” From 1831–1832, another flow of writing and rewriting saw Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Godwin’s Caleb Williams, St Leon (1799) and Fleetwood, or The New Man of Feeling (1805), revised and republished with a panoply of authorial prefaces in the Standard English Novels series.
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Reviewed by
Steven Jones
Loyola University Chicago

First, in the interest of full disclosure: I was lucky enough a few years back to do journeyman editor’s work on the related Garland Publishing series, The Bodleian Shelley MSS, also under the general editorship of Donald H. Reiman. It was a remarkable education, one which left me thoroughly convinced of the larger importance of these monumental series. Their purpose is, first, to disseminate knowledge of archival primary sources, to make widely available, in photographic facsimiles accompanied by expert transcriptions and annotations, rare materials that were once only accessible to a handful of scholars conducting specialized research primarily in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. My own modest contributions to the series were like the proverbial individual stones laid in the wall of a larger collective edifice. The two volumes of The Frankenstein Notebooks here under review represent, by contrast, a whole archival wing of useful knowledge, a striking example of just what this kind of “diplomatic” edition–for that is what these two volumes are: an important scholarly edition–really can do. At the bicentennial of the author’s birth, along with Nora Crook’s Pickering edition and Stuart Curran’s forthcoming Pennsylvania Hypertext edition, Charles Robinson’s edition of Frankenstein manuscripts puts studies of the novel on a whole new footing for the coming century.

I am writing and filing the present review exactly 180 years after the publication of the first edition of what is arguably the most widely known literary work of the Romantic period. The correct date of its publication, 1 January 1818, is just one of the many facts clarified by the Garland edition. Everyone knows some version of the story of the Genevan summer of 1816, when the tale was first conceived (Robinson posits an 1816 version of the “Ur-text” narrative); Romanticists are aware that there are significant differences between the first printed edition of 1818 and the next major revised edition of 1831. Robinson steps back from the first edition and offers a detailed picture of how Mary Shelley got from the Ur-text “story” to the printed novel of 1818, the process of composition and revision by which Frankenstein came into the world.

The edition publishes for the first time the extant portions of the 1816-1817 Draft and the 1817 Fair Copy manuscripts, and prints both in a parallel format that allows the reader to study 400 pages of manuscript photofacsimiles in Mary Shelley’s (MWS’s) hand, with editorial and collaborative emendations by MWS and Percy Bysshe Shelley (PBS), and to compare these with the first printed text. The result is a fascinating representation of some of the material evidence of a creative process, through what Robinson refers to as a “de facto collation” of the manuscripts with the 1818 text. Though portions of these materials have been transcribed and discussed before, especially in treatments of PBS’s role in the composition of the novel, this edition finally makes available a complete and accurate transcription– along with the visual evidence of the photofacsimiles, so that when the book is opened the reader can (1) examine revisions to the manuscript in the hands of both MWS and PBS on the verso pages; (2) compare these with Robinson’s “type facsimile” transcription immediately to the right (where PBS’s hand is represented in an italic font and MWS’s in a roman); (3) and compare all of that with a “diplomatic” transcription of the printed novel in the 1818 edition, along the right-hand margin of the recto pages. For example, we can follow MWS’s addition of a passage in the left margin of the Draft (“as I had been united by no link . . . “), then see PBS adding a phrase (“in existence”) that is also retained in the printed novel (transcribed at the far right, at the edge of the image below). But the traces of this process are presented not, as I have just done, as narrative, but physically, graphically.

Robinson’s introduction builds on the work of previous editors but offers the most comprehensive description to date of the subtle differences between the handwriting of MWS and PBS, but in the end the reader is free to look at the photographs and judge the evidence for herself or himself. The transcription employs different typefaces to differentiate the different hands, and designates ambiguous cases with a question mark.

For teachers and students of Frankenstein (whose numbers seem to have increased exponentially in recent years), perhaps the most immediate benefit of this edition will be to set some material limits within which to discuss the question of the Shelleys’ collaboration on the novel. Even to use that word, “collaboration,” is to raise some vexed and provocative questions, but as Robinson reminds us, it does not mean to “co- author” in equal portions but merely to “work together.” The cumulative result of this edition’s evidence is to make it clear that “PBS’s contributions to Frankenstein were no more than what most publishers’ editors have provided new (or old) authors or, in fact, what colleagues have provided to each other after reading each other’s works in progress” (I, lxvii). Anyone who has taught the novel to undergraduates knows how easily student exaggerations of claims about the manuscripts made by some critics can lead to caricatures of PBS as a Svengali who either co-authored or (more often) completely took over the revision of MWS’s novel. While some may remain uncomfortable with Robinson’s biological metaphor casting PBS as the “able midwife” who assists at the birth of the novel that MWS “conceived and developed” (lxvii), his general point, based on the physical evidence for the book’s “maternity,” as it were, provides a needed corrective. Though the editor rightly balks at any exact census-tally of PBS’s contributed words (estimating them to be somewhere in the 4000 range), the edition makes it clear that the Author of Frankenstein was MWS and it also greatly clarifies the nature of PBS’s “advisory role.”

For example, James Rieger’s assertion that PBS originally conceived of having Victor travel to England to create a female Monster subtly distorts what PBS actually wrote in the margin of the Draft: “I think the journey to England ought to be Victor’s proposal . . . . He ought to lead his father to this in the conversations–”. As Robinson explains, this notation was made well after MWS had already come up with the idea of having Victor make the journey to create the Creature’s “bride”–it’s just that she had originally attributed the idea for the trip to Victor’s father. PBS was not responsible for the important and highly significant plot detail–the planned creation of a female Monster–he merely suggested a way to emphasize Victor’s motives (and MWS apparently accepted the suggestion).

This edition will be extremely useful to teachers, students, and scholars in a number of ways, due in no small part to the remarkable bibliographic reconstructions begun by Dr. Bruce Barker-Benfield of the Bodleian Library and continued by Robinson in this edition. The placement of the now-disbound leaves of the manuscript notebooks has been meticulously reconstructed with the help of detailed quiring charts and beta radiograph analysis. Not only with its expert readings of the handwriting, then, but through these reconstructions the edition offers information on the manuscripts that only a handful or experienced experts could ever deduce from the “raw” physical evidence of the original documents themselves.

But the edition will also be an important reference for any future study of Frankenstein and for Mary Shelley studies in general–quite apart from its facsimiles and transcriptions. As the table of contents shows, its apparatus includes mini-essays of significance on, for example, MWS’s changes to the names of characters in the successive drafts, or on marginal numbering and dates in the manuscripts. Even the purely functional list of short-title abbreviations contains scholarly insights, as does the highly impressive 30-page Frankenstein Chronology, where a single entry’s annotation can provide a compressed cache of useful knowledge.

Appendices include a parallel texts of the 1816-17 Draft and (extant) 1817 Fair Copy and of a portion of PBS’s Fair Copy and MWS’s retranscription of that portion, as well as photofacsimiles of the two-leaf (four-page) Cyrus Fragment, which came to the Bodleian Library along with the Frankenstein manuscripts in 1974 and 1976.

Romanticists, Shelley scholars, and, for that matter, anyone interested in the archetypally resonant story of Mary Shelley’s Modern Prometheus will in future have to consult this indispensable edition. It represents the best kind of Promethean scholarly obsession: the meticulous pursuit of useful and enlightening knowledge about the complex process of artistic production.