THE LIMITS OF THE ROMANTIC AESTHETIC IN MARY
SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN
_______________
A Thesis
Presented to the
Faculty of
San Diego State University
_______________
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
in
English
_______________
by
Erica B. Aguillon
Spring 2011
iii
Copyright © 2011
by
Erica B. Aguillon
All Rights Reserved
iv
DEDICATION
To my husband and my family, for their support.
v
ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS
The Limits of the Romantic Aesthetic in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
by
Erica B. Aguillon
Master of Arts in English
San Diego State University, 2011
In this thesis I examine Mary Shelley’s departure from the Romantic tradition in
order to reflect of the failure of Nature to inspire tranquility, in the context of the growing
concern with urban menace picked up in the works of her father, William Godwin, and his
contemporary, Thomas Holcroft. At the heart of this project is a conversation between
Shelley and her contemporaries regarding both the limits of the Romantic aesthetic and
shifting attitudes towards the city. Tracing these anxieties to the fears generated by the
Gordon Riots and the French Revolution, I argue that sublime Nature, in the tradition of
William Wordsworth, is unable to contain the evils unleashed by metropolitan horrors,
ultimately suggesting that Shelley’s novel inaugurates the Gothic shift from the rural castles
of Walpole and Radcliffe to the urban streets of Stevenson and Stoker.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
ABSTRACT ...............................................................................................................................v
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................... vii
INTRODUCTION .....................................................................................................................1
CHAPTER
1
REIMAGINING THE GOTHIC....................................................................................5 2
IMAGINING URBANITY ..........................................................................................19 3
NATURE’S FAILURE AND THE CREATURE’S TRIUMPH .................................40 REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................52 vii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to the faculty and staff of the English department for all of their assistance
and support. I am particularly indebted to Dr. Quentin Bailey, without whom this thesis
would not have been possible.
1
INTRODUCTION
Imagine to yourself a high exalted essence of mingled odours, arising from putrid
gums, imposthumated lungs, sour flatulencies, rank armpits, sweating feet, running
sores and issues, plasters, ointments… Such is the atmosphere I have exchanged for
the pure, elastic, animating air of the Welsh mountains – O Rus, quando te aspiciam!1
Tobias Smollett, Humphrey Clinker, 1771
I slept indeed, but I was disturbed by the wildest dreams. I thought I saw Elizabeth, in
the bloom of health, walking the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I
embraced her; but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the
hue of death.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818
Victor Frankenstein’s dream directs the reader’s attention to a number of the novel’s
more chilling motifs. Having “rushed” from the room following the birth of the Creature,
Victor dreams his future fiancé decays into the body of his dead mother at the touch of his
lips, only for him to wake and behold again “the miserable monster whom [he] had created”
(Shelley, The 1818 Text, 39). Long held to be indicative of the novel’s concern with Faustian
overreaching, patriarchal ambition, and the usurpation of feminine creation powers,
Frankenstein’s nightmare has courted substantial critical attention. 2 Anca Vlasopolos situates
the dream within what she describes as the novel’s dominant theme of incest-avoidance,
pointing to Victor and the Creature’s oedipal obsession (125), while Jerrold Hogle,
borrowing from Sigmund Freud and Julia Kristeva, points to the underlying infantile drive in
Victor’s dream: “The hero's nightmare in Frankenstein, it seems, is at least the Freudian
displacement where we are all shown to be concealing, in fact to be reversing, infantile
8-9.
1
From the book notes: Horace, Satires, 2, 6, 60; O country house, when shall I behold you!
2
See Hogle, “Frankenstein’s Dream,” para 6; George Levine, “The Ambiguous Heritage of Frankenstein,”
2
longings of both eros and thanatos”(FD).3 Overlooked in scholarship, however, is the
location of Frankenstein’s dream—a city street—which itself presents significant
implications.
Set in the streets of Ingolstadt rather than the Frankenstein home in the country, this
rendering speaks to Shelley’s awareness of the city’s role in Victor’s downfall.4 The
inclusion of Elizabeth in the dream, who is carefully described as “in the bloom of health,”
identifies a concern with the dangerous possibilities associated with Elizabeth’s removal
from her rural home. 5 This concern, as I argue in this thesis, is partially the result of a
growing anxiety with urbanization which manifested itself in the writings of period as moral
contamination, fear, and the Romantic aesthetic. In the case of Shelley’s novel, the
overarching theme of domestic affection and the destructive effects of ambitious excess are
symbolically represented in Victor’s nightmare. 6 The setting the dream, in which an
innocent youth is infected with a disease contracted in the streets, is one that preoccupied
many writers of the period. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the fear of city contamination
was so widespread that guides to navigating the city were a popular form of both
entertainment and urban education. The Countryman’s Guide to London (1775) offered its
readers, “a picture of low-life that is daily acted in this town, to the ruin of thousands of
innocent youth, and the distress of thousands of disconsolate parents” (Cooke iii). Shelley’s
choice to cast Frankenstein’s dream in the city streets rather than rural countryside of his
home reveals her interest in the city as a source of Gothic nightmares, and, as I shall
ultimately argue, marks the beginning of the urban gothic genre. Although Shelley’s work is
3
For additional readings see Bibliography, VanWinkle, Rieder; in addition to Jonathan Glance, “Beyond
the Usual Bounds of Reverie”? Another Look at the Dreams in Frankenstein.” (The Journal of the Fantastic in
the Arts 7.4 (1996): 30-47; Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York:
Methuen, 1988); Fred Botting, “Freud’s Navel, Frankenstein’s Dream: Mastery or the Return of Difference”
(118-138) in Making Monstrous: Frankenstein, Criticism, Theory (Manchester, Manchester University Press,
1991); and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s iconic reading in The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven,
Conn.:Yale University Press, 1979).
4
Though Ingolstadt is certainly not on the same metropolitan scale as London, it’s distinction from the
country is perhaps on par with Oxford in Holcroft’s Hugh Trevor.
5
Interestingly, Elizabeth’s decay is a reference to Victor’s reflections on his study of decomposing
cadavers, “I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life” (34).
6
The theme of “domestic affection” has been exhausted in critical research on Frankenstein. Some
important contributors include Kate Ellis, George Levine, Anne K. Mellor, and Michelle Levy.
3
certainly not a treatise on the dangers of urban contamination, it does share with such writing
a suspicion about the detrimental effects of city life and, conversely, with the regenerative
effects of Nature. Nature—in an explicitly Wordsworthian sense—figures predominately
throughout the text, serving to counterbalance urban threats. 7The Romantic aesthetic, in
which Nature serves to mitigate the effects of “the din/ Of towns and cities” (Tintern Abbey,
lines 25-26), is interrogated in Frankenstein; Shelley contests this aesthetic in Victor’s
fruitless appeals to Nature to “Teach the adverting mind” (Mont Blanc, 100), and in her
creation of a monstrous force that cannot be contained even by “The still and solemn power”
(128) of Mont Blanc. In so doing, Mary Shelley not only articulates a new vision of
Romantic sublimity, but also introduces a new paradigm for the Gothic novel to engage.
This thesis examines Mary Shelley’s departure from the Romantic tradition in order
to reflect on the failure of Nature to overcome menaces and cement domestic affections. My
study specifically aims to locate the source of Shelley’s evil—long associated with the
masculine birth, technophobia, and Godwinian critique—in social and literary concerns
centered on urban development and menace. Shelley’s attention to urban horrors, which
previous Gothic writers had generally ignored, is occasioned by a number of socio-historical
factors. Shelley’s writing is appreciably influenced by her reaction to the political and
intellectual radicalism of her parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.8 In
Frankenstein, as Lee Sterrenburg has pointed out, Shelley “attempts to move beyond the
utopian politics of [her father]” (144), while, as I will later argue, interrogating the Romantic
aesthetic of husband Percy Shelley and his contemporaries. References to Frankenstein
throughout are, unless otherwise noted, from the 1818 edition of the text. In the first chapter I
examine the Gothic novels preceding Frankenstein, situating Shelley’s writing within the
Gothic tradition and investigating the genre’s treatment of space as a feature of aesthetic
horror. Chapter two begins with the significant demographic changes of the period, along
with the literary responses to the shifting perception of urban pedestrianism in the 18th
7
In his seminal study, Edwin B. Burgum remarks, “To Wordsworth, nature is an objective reality,
virtually synonymous with God, to which the poet reverently subordinates himself” (“Romanticism.” The
Kenyon Review. 3.4, 1941) 481.
8
Shelley in fact refers to herself as “the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity” in the
1831 introduction.
4
century; I suggest that the increasingly ominous characterizations of city menaces—and by
extension the relative serenity associated with rural refuge—informed the natural/unnatural
dichotomy in Shelley’s novel. In the second section I expand my study to include the Gothic
sensibilities Shelley inherited from her parents and contemporaries, particularly those of
Godwin and his close associate Thomas Holcroft. Critically, as I shall try to demonstrate,
their diagnosis of urban terrors and preoccupation with metropolitan surveillance and
isolation are developed in Shelley’s novel, providing a metaphoric basic for the Creature,
who ultimately triumphs over Nature, rendered incapable of containing the threat he presents.
By the novel’s conclusion, Shelley successfully interrogates the Romantic idealism which
claims that solitary reflection on sublime landscapes, rather than domestic affections and
conjugal communion, offers true happiness and spiritual fulfillment.
5
CHAPTER 1
REIMAGINING THE GOTHIC
Nearly everything known about Mary Shelley’s personal and literary life suggests
that she would write a novel in which Nature was triumphant. Her husband, Percy Bysshe
Shelley, was a key figure in the Romantic Movement and close associate of both Lord Byron
and John Keats. Nature factored significantly in her father William Godwin’s writings,
notably, as Monika Fludernik has pointed out, in Political Justice where Godwin, “had
associated the appreciation of sublime landscape with virtue and sensibility” (867). Her
mother Mary Wollstonecraft had penned Letters Written during a Short Residence in
Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, a travel narrative dear to husband and daughter, on which
the former had famously remarked, “If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in
love with its author, this appears to be the book” (133).9 Wollstonecraft observes Nature’s
ability to overcome even the horrors of the French revolution:
I gazed around with rapture, and felt more of that spontaneous pleasure which gives
credibility to our expectations of happiness, than I had for a long, long time before. I
forgot the horrors I had witnessed in France, which had cast a gloom over all
nature…to be lighted afresh, care took wing while simple fellow feeling expanded my
heart (11).
Mary Shelley’s exposure and adherence to Romantic idealism is evident in both Frankenstein
and subsequent publications. The Shelleys’ tour throughout Europe, and to Geneva in
particular—which factors predominately throughout Mary’s novel—became the inspiration
for a number of Frankenstein’s most memorable pastoral images. Notably, Victor’s
reflections on nature mirror the language in Shelley’s passages on her travels. In her History
9
Cynthia Richards has discussed the critical success and influence of Wollstonecraft’s Letters in her
article Fair Trade: The Language of Love and Commerce in Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written during a
Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 30:(2001) 71-89.
6
of a Six Week’s Tour written in Geneva in 1816, Mary describes the scene upon leaving Paris
and the French countryside:
To what a different scene are we now arrived! To the warm sunshine and to the
humming of sun-loving insects. From the windows of our hotel we see the lovely
lake, blue as the heavens which it reflects, and sparkling with golden beams….behind
[the banks] rise the various ridges of black mountains, and towering far above, in the
midst of the snowy Alps, the majestic Mont Blanc, highest and queen of all (94).
Much later, in her Rambles in Germany and Italy, in 1840, 1842, and 1843, Shelley wistfully
recalls, “[I]n my girlhood I visited Scotland, and saw from my window the snow-clad
Grampian, and I then imbibed this love for the ‘palaces of nature,’ which, when far off,
haunts me still, with a keen desire to be among them, and a sense of extreme content when in
their vicinity” (119).
Shelley’s “palaces of nature” is a direct reference to Byron’s 1816 description of the Alps
from his travelogue Child Harold’s Pilgrimage: “The palaces of nature, whose vast walls/
Have pinnacled in clouds their snowy scalps…cold sublimity” (3.LXII). Recalling her
summer spent reading Wordsworth with Byron and Percy Shelley years before, here Mary
Shelley returns to the time Frankenstein was conceived, and to the Romantic view of
Nature’s restorative power.
As one might anticipate given Shelley’s fascination for mountain scenery and Mont
Blanc in particular, descriptions of snow-covered mountains fill the pages of Frankenstein.
Victor notes that the ruined castles on the Arve were “augmented and rendered sublime by
the mighty Alps,” where, “Mont Blanc, the supreme and magnificent Mont Blanc, raised
itself from the surrounding aiguilles” (Shelley 73).10 The profound influence of
Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and the Romantic aesthetic on Mary Shelley extends to her
conception of nature’s ability to inspire moral virtue and emotional tranquility. Following the
death of Justine, Victor’s father suggests that they travel to the valley of Chamounix, as it
was “the best means of restoring…wonted serenity” (72). Upon their entrance to the valley
Victor concedes, “These sublime and magnificent scenes afforded me the greatest
consolation that I was capable of receiving” (74). Fred Botting indeed notes that Victor’s
10
A reference to the Aiguilles Rouges in France.
7
description of the Chamounix valley “induces an affirmative sense of transcendence more in
common with Romantic solitary wanderings than Burkean terror” (40).11 In outward
accordance with her father’s philosophy, Shelley reimagines in Frankenstein Godwin’s
characterization of the man of taste and accomplishment in Political Justice. Nature’s
influence on man results in newfound pleasures and philosophic revelations. He writes:
The man of taste and liberal accomplishments . . . acquires new senses, and a new
range of enjoyment. The beauties of nature are all his own. He admires the
overhanging cliff, the wide-extended prospect, the vast expanse of the ocean, the
foliage of the woods, the sloping lawn and the waving grass. He knows the pleasures
of solitude, when man holds commerce alone with the tranquil solemnity of nature. . .
. He has traced the subject of the universe...He studies; and has experienced the
pleasures which result from conscious perspicuity and discovered truth (212).
Shelley endows Victor with all of the qualities of the man of taste. He finds pleasure in
solitary commune with nature’s beauties, and ambitiously seeks scientific discovery and
truth. But in a departure from Godwinian philosophy, rather than finding purpose and selfactualization during his scientific pursuits, Victor Frankenstein attains no lasting solace in the
sublime, and is subsequently destroyed for pursuing scientific discovery at the cost of
domestic tranquility. It is here that Shelley enters into a conversation with Godwin and the
Romantics regarding nature’s failure to inspire tranquility and elevate the mind. Shelley’s
poignant situation of the meeting between the Creature and Victor Frankenstein in the Alps
suggests that even her beloved Mont Blanc is incapable of restoring the Creature to humanity
and Victor to morality. Frankenstein’s investigation of Nature’s shortcomings—its inability
to inspire (as Godwin and Wordsworth had argued) philosophic truths and overcome moral
threats—also reveals Shelley’s location of these threats within the urban sphere. Victor’s
ambitions, while confined to the domestic, natural space, are harmless; but nurtured in the
urban environment, Victor’s illicit desires manifest themselves in the form of the Creature.
Shelley’s novel can be understood as exploring both the limits of the Romantic aesthetic and
the underlying threat of urban development.
11
Notably, however, Botting forgoes a closer examination of this dynamic, broadly concluding that
“Frankenstein’s geographical and social settings place it outside other Gothic conventions” (40).
8
Within the context of the Gothic literary genre, Frankenstein resides in a position of
both ideological and aesthetic novelty. As Botting as noted of the 18th century Gothic novel,
“Medieval architecture became a significant feature of the genre: castles or monasteries in
vary states of disrepair set the scene for superstition and supernatural occurrences. In
Frankenstein, however, castles lose their central function of inspiring terror; they merely
reside in the mountainous scenery as an invocation of a convention that is not elaborated”
(39-40). What Botting overlooks in this assessment is that rather than simply elaborate,
Shelley points towards a new path for the Gothic to pursue. It is within Frankenstein that the
“urban” Gothic can be located in its first, fully-realized incarnation. Long set in remote rural
castles and haunted abbeys, a feature of early Gothic novels was their experimenting with the
possibilities of, as Kathleen Spencer has put it, “violating the laws of nature” (200). Social
anxieties concerning the Gothic tradition, the city’s menace, and the writings of Godwin and
his contemporaries intersect in Shelley’s novel to create a counter-representation of the
Romantic aesthetic. This opposition—the perilous city versus the serene country—reoccurs
throughout the text, and the influence of Shelley’s parents and husband’s work is here
undeniable. In History of a Six Week’s Tour, she writes “[t]he high mountains encompassed
us, darkening the waters; at a distance the chapel of Tell… and indeed this lovely lake, these
sublime mountains, and wild forests seemed a fit cradle for a mind aspiring to high adventure
and heroic deeds” (50).12 For Percy and Mary, the forests and mountains of the Swiss Alps
are a perfect setting for “high adventure and heroic deeds.” Recalling the Romantic
sentiments exemplified in works such as Wordsworth’s The Pedlar, Shelley’s appreciation of
pastoral retreats can be found in Frankenstein’s numerous monologues commending the
restorative powers of nature. In his narration to Walton, Victor Frankenstein recalls, “A
serene sky and verdant fields filled me with ecstasy… I was undisturbed by thoughts which
during the preceding year had pressed upon me” (51). Victor’s reflections closely echo those
in the The Pedlar, a poem that encapsulates the Romantic Aesthetic of the late 18th century.13
Wordsworth writes,
12
Here the Shelley’s describe their journey through Switzerland with Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont.
The Pedlar, composed in 1798, would have been unknown to Shelley, though she would likely have
known The Excursion (1814).
13
9
Low desires,
Low thoughts, had there no place; yet was his heart
Lowly, for he was meek in gratitude
Oft as he called to mind those ecstasies,
And whence they flowed; and from them he acquired
Wisdom which works through patience. (Wu 438)
But unlike the shepherd, who, on the mountain-top, gains wisdom and contentment through
solitary reflection and natural communion, Victor finds no lasting transformation from
sublime exposure. The city of Ingolstadt, the birthplace of the Creature and manifestation of
Victor’s excessive ambitions, becomes the antithesis of the Natural, domestic sphere.
Throughout the novel Shelley creates a division between the urban and rural spaces, the
former synonymous with decay and Frankenstein’s unnatural desires, the latter with domestic
felicity and the Romantic sublime. Picking up on the untapped fear in Romanticism of urban
development, the threat the Creature poses represents both the neglect of domestic
attachments and the threat of urban overgrowth to the Romantic aesthetic. 14
As discussed in the first chapter, a significant motivation for this dynamic lies in the
socio-economic and demographic changes that dominated the 18th century. Descriptions of
London as a noisy, filthy, and vice-filled metropolis characterized a great deal of the
literature devoted to urban life in the 18th century, and well into the next. Samuel Johnson
deftly observed, “They who have already enjoyed the crowds and noise of the great city,
know their desire to return is little more than the restlessness of a vacant mind, that they are
not so much led by hope as driven by disgust, and wish rather to leave the country than to see
the town”.15 By collapsing social anxieties concerning urban menace into a narrative about
14
Numerous critics have reflected on the novel’s interest in domestic affections. Michelle Levy in
particular has convincingly argued that “Shelley saw the domestic affections as the primary tool for restraining
these [imperialistic and scientific] excesses” (694).
15
Idler #80 (October 27, 1759)
10
Natural limitations, Shelley creates an urban Gothic novel. Michael Gamer has defined the
Gothic as “neither…a mode nor as a kind of fiction (the “gothic novel”) but as an aesthetic”
(Romanticism 4), while Robert Mighall classifies the Gothic as a discursive tradition which
shares historical and geographical interests (xiv). Though the categorization of “gothic” as a
genre as been long disputed, contemporary observers such as Gamer, Mighall, David Punter,
Jerrold Hogle, James Chandler, and Robert Miles have invariably pointed to Horace
Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew Lewis as iconic early Gothic novelists, if to varying
degrees. While the Gothic preoccupation with castles, ruins, illicit sexuality, fatal women,
and specters has been exhausted within critical research, there is far less discussion of the
genre in regards to another prevalent feature of Gothic narratives: the shift from the rural to
the urban landscape. This shift, as I argue throughout this thesis, is central to an
understanding of Frankenstein and shapes the novel’s investigation of the dominant
Romantic aesthetic.
Though recent studies have investigated the historical, aesthetic, and demographic
features of the Urban Gothic, these explorations have yielded little in regards to the literary
inauguration of this shift. The Gothic of the 19th century registers a new set of concerns, ones
that diverge from the representations of the medieval or historical terrors of The Mysteries of
Udolpho, The Castle of Otranto, and Lewis’s The Monk. Mighall has offered a broad
explanation, suggesting that the Urban Gothic belongs to the mid-Victorian era. He notes of
W.M. Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London (1844-1848) that “Reynolds has effected a
transportation, shifting the scene for locating terrors from the exotic and ‘historical’ settings
of Radcliffe, Lewis, and Maturin to the contemporary urban context” (30). Mighall’s location
of urban terrors in the Gothic in the middle of the century disregards the earlier movement of
cultural anxieties out of the rural space and into the urban that took place in the latter end of
the 18th century.16 For Mighall, the Urban Gothic is particularly influenced by historical
16
There are those who locate the urban gothic movement, or “revived romance”, as late as the 1880’s and
1890’s. See Kathleen L Spencer’s “Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian
Degeneracy Crisis” (ELH 59.1 (1992): 197-225). Additionally, while David Punter has observed that
Frankenstein has been identified as the moment in which the period of the classic Gothic novel ended, he
remarks that it isn’t until the 1860’s that the “romantic Gothic villain is transformed as monks, bandits, and
threatening foreigners give way to criminals, madmen and scientists” (Gothic 26).
11
concerns regarding the underclass and the association of poverty with criminality, an
observation furthered by Gamer who asserts that “Urban Gothic horror is found in the
sanitary sphere” (68).17 Other inquiries into 19th century Gothic texts focus on what Grace
Kehler has identified as the “gothic’s mobilization of feelings for the purposes of public
instruction and urban reform” (439), a critique that displaces the significance of Gothic
monsters in favor of Gothic subjects. What are generally overlooked in such scholarship are
both the literary location of the shift from Gothic to Urban Gothic, and a close examination
of the Gothic texts that lead to the evolution of the genre. As such, the emergence of the
Urban Gothic as a genre is generally considered to occupy the mid to late 19th century. But a
close study of Gothic texts reveals a much earlier shift than is generally recognized.
Judith Halberstam’s exploration of Gothic bodies and monsters has lead her to a
similar conclusion. Pointing to Frankenstein (specifically, the later edition), she notes that
“from the late eighteenth to the nineteenth century, the terrain of Gothic horror shifted from
the fear of the corrupted aristocracy or clergy, represented by the haunted castle or abbey, to
the fear embodied by monstrous bodies” (16). Halberstam suggests that the movement of
Gothic preoccupations that took place during the 18th and 19th centuries is one of physical,
rather than geographic location. Indeed, a prevailing feature of Gothic literature in the 19th
century is the personification of complex historical and social concerns in the body of a
monstrous figure. The latter end of the century saw the addition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Bram Stroker’s
Dracula to the Gothic pantheon, differing from their predecessors in both their location of
Gothic horror and meaning in the body of the monster, and within urban society. As
Halberstam notes, “Gothic novels produce a symbol for this interpretive mayhem in the body
of the monster. The monster always becomes a primary focus of interpretation” (2). Though
Halberstam does indeed point to Frankenstein as the quintessential 19th century Gothic novel,
her focus on urban bodies rather than the urban spaces disregards Frankenstein’s critical
focus on geography and the rural/urban dichotomy. This chapter will historicize the
movement of Gothic concerns from the rural to the urban space, contending that it is in
17
Michelle Allen discusses this dynamic in her article Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in
Victorian London (2008).
12
Frankenstein that urban horrors and Gothic sensibilities meet. In the opening of her essay
“Frankenstein as Mystery Play,” Judith Wilt briefly addresses what few scholars have
pursued regarding the geography of the Gothic novel. Describing Shelley’s decision to move
the English Gothic from the “God-haunted Mediterranean into the Swiss Republic,” she
notes, “In the early 19th century, however, Switzerland, with just a quick foray into Scotland,
is as close as the Gothic can be allowed to come” (31). Wilt raises an interesting point, and
one central to this thesis. In an examination of the following texts, I will chart the
development of urban Gothic menaces from the genre’s preliminary manifestations to Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein. What informs Shelley’s novel here is not the focus on monstrous
bodies, but on monstrous geographies. By way of the Gothic form, Shelley interrogates
Romantic aesthetics, revealing that urban concerns are central to both Gothic and Romantic
texts.
Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), often regarded as the first of the Gothic
novels, is a conjunction of 18th century views on Medieval feudalism and aristocracy (Punter
106), supernatural symbolism, and historical reimagination.18 Set entirely in rural Italy,
Otranto introduces a number of Gothic features including the pursued virginal maid19, the
ancestral specter, domestic infelicity as an occasion of horror, forbidden knowledge, and
what a 1765 review of The Castle of Otranto identifies as “the unchristian doctrine of visiting
the sins of the fathers upon the children” (118). Despite a series of inexplicable supernatural
events and the warnings of the church, Manfred, the Lord of Otranto, aims to divorce his
wife and pursue a young virgin in order to secure his illegitimate claim to the throne. The
events of Otranto are happily concluded when the rightful heir of the castle saves the maid
from an unwanted marriage and the tyrant is displaced. In characteristic 18th century Gothic
style, the instances of horror in Otranto are confined to the castle. Walpole’s novel engages
cultural concerns with domestic oppression and sexual perversion, which arguably manifest
themselves in Frankenstein as Victor’s ill-treatment of Elizabeth and the Creature’s perverse
conception. Manfred is condemned for both his ill-treatment of his faultless wife, and his
18
19
Punter and Hogle in particular point to Walpole as having originated the genre.
A character that reappears as Nouronihar in William Beckford’s Vathek, Antonia in Lewis’s The Monk,
and Elizabeth Lavenza in Frankenstein.
13
insistence he marry and bed young lady Isabella, a girl his daughter’s age. Having lost
Isabella in the castle’s corridors, Manfred states, “Since hell will not satisfy my curiosity…I
will use the human means in my power for preserving my race; Isabella shall not escape me”
(23). Manfred’s excessive desire for the forbidden—another recurring Gothic trope—drives
the occurrences of horror throughout the novel. His violent rages are as much an occasion for
terror as the supernatural incidents. The narrator notes that “[Isabella’s] dread of Manfred
soon outweighed every other terror” (24). Walpole’s historical Gothic novel explores
anxieties concerning aristocracy, tyranny and domestic affection in the form of usurped
princedoms and haunted castles. The reinforcement of domestic ideals as they pertain to the
Gothic is particularly relevant to Shelley’s novel, in addition to the more obvious connection
with illicit knowledge and excessive desire. However, in the Castle of Otranto, as we shall
see in other Gothic novels of the 18th century, the horrors of monstrous geography, history,
and society are containable.
Vathek, William Beckford’s 1786 novel, is another historic rendering of the Gothic
set in an exotic locale. A precursor to Frankenstein, Vathek introduces a number of the
terrors to be reimagined by later Gothic novelists, such as concerns regarding excessive
passions, restless ambition, and forbidden knowledge. The novel anticipates many of
Frankenstein’s concerns with excessive desires and domestic corruption, but unlike Shelley’s
novel, is able to contain these within an Orientalist discourse that locates the source of terror
in far-away lands and mythic figures. Beckford’s Vathek is the Caliph of a thriving
metropolis whose exhaustive desire for knowledge leads him and his family to destruction.
Of the Caliph the narrator notes that “he had studied so much for his amusement…as to
acquire a great deal of knowledge, though not a sufficiency to satisfy himself; for he wished
to know every thing; even sciences that did not exist” (86). Excess desire for knowledge and
power, a feature of the Gothic to be revisited by both Godwin and Shelley, results in the
primary occasions of horror in the novel; Vathek sacrifices fifty of the city’s children to the
jinns in order to be led to the palace that houses the world’s power. Vathek’s only equal in
ambition is his mother Carathis, whom the Caliph “respected…as a person of superior
genius” (89). However, unlike the virginal maids and idealized maternal figures in other
Gothic novels, Beckford’s female characters are indicted in the excesses that result in the
story’s terror. His wife, Nouronihar, is infected with Vathek’s pride and joins him and his
14
mother in eternal damnation. The narrator’s final words reinforce the Miltonic notion of
divine knowledge:
Such was, and such should be, the punishment of unrestrained passions and atrocious
deeds! Such shall be, the chastisement of that blind curiosity, which would transgress
those bounds the wisdom of the Creator has prescribed to human knowledge; and
such the dreadful disappointment of that restless ambition, which, aiming at
discoveries reserved for beings of a supernatural order, perceives not, through its
infatuated pride, that the condition of man upon earth is to be—humble and ignorant
(153).
Beckford’s resounding aphorism is reimagined in both St. Leon and Frankenstein. But
though there is no possibility of moral or spiritual reconciliation in Vathek, Beckford’s
horrors are less threatening than the terrors of later works; the novel reveals that location is
central to the Gothic’s rendering of terrors. Set in distant Asia, Vathek is distinguished from
other Gothic novels by its emphasis on exotic gods, specters, and the Islamic religion. The
terrors suggested are moderated by unfamiliarity and foreign detachment, unlike 19th century
works set within the streets of London itself. Beckford further distances the novel’s terrors by
subtitling it “An Arabian Tale”, an addition that—while appealing to 18th century interest in
Orientalism—removes the horrors from the realm of British possibility and access.
In The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) Ann Radcliffe brings the Gothic closer to Britain
than Beckford, Walpole, or Lewis. Set in early modern France and Italy, nature is itself a
character in the novel, personified in Radcliffe’s extended descriptions of rural landscapes.
Describing St. Aubert and Emily’s travels through the Pyrenees, the narrator notes,
“Sometimes a cliff was seen lifting its bold head above the woods and the vapors that floated
midway down the mountains; and sometimes a face of perpendicular marble rose from the
water’s edge, over which he threw his gigantic arms” (31). A clear nod to Walpole’s
monstrous knight, the description of nature as monstrous is part of Radcliff’s “Gothicizing”
of the rural space. Mighall has suggested that to be Gothicized is to be historicized—to be
associated with the medieval past. “Criminality,” he observes, “is Gothicized by being
associated with the past, it perpetuates the errors of benighted antiquity” (49). But rather than
Gothicizing Nature by its association with medieval or early modern castles, ruins and
criminality, Radcliffe suggests that Nature itself is as menacing as it is existentially
revitalizing; here geography, rather than the body, is monstrous. Radcliffe constructs
15
competing conceptions of the rural space: Nature as monstrous and Nature as spiritually
fortifying. But ultimately the terrors of Udolpho and the menace posed by nature’s
destructive potential are overcome by nature’s ability to inspire serenity and promote
physical wellbeing. Regarding St. Aubert’s illness, the text notes that “the green woods and
pastures…seem to revivify the soul, and make existence bliss” (8). Radcliffe reconciles
Gothic terrors that accompany Romantic aesthetics. While crags of “stupendous height and
fantastic shape…along whose broken ridges was often lodged a weight of snow, that,
trembling even to the vibration of a sound, threatened to bear destruction in its course to the
vale,” the narrator reminds us that, “The serenity and clearness of the air…was particularly
delightful to travels; it seemed to inspire them with a finer spirit, and diffused an
indescribable complacency over their minds” (35). Radcliffe extends her analogies to create
a dichotomy between savage, menacing nature, and the wild, Romantic sublime. The
potential dangers of the rural space are overcome by nature’s ability to revitalize and inspire.
The image of the monstrous cliff whose “gigantic arms” threaten the destruction of the valley
below is reconciled by the spiritual and constitutional benefits of the natural landscape.
Radcliffe’s novel ultimately embraces the Romantic aesthetic in a way that Mary Shelley’s
does not. As we will find in Frankenstein, Shelley’s monstrous personification of the Gothic
cannot be reconciled within Romantic ideals.
In contrast to the ambiguous role of nature in Udolpho, the city is decidedly more
menacing, early on associated with infestation and contamination. St. Aubert, who is
consistently connected to scenes of domestic tranquility and natural delights, is quoted as
saying time spent with his wife and children was “infinitely more delightful than any passed
amid the brilliant and tumultuous scenes that are courted by the world” (6). His admiration of
Valencourt is spurred by the latter’s lack of urban knowledge: “St. Aubert was pleased with
him: Here is the real ingenuousness and ardor of youth, said he to himself; this young man
has never been to Paris” (30). Radcliffe begins to hint at the concerns of infection that are
closely tied to the Urban Gothic. In addition to reconciling rural terrors, Radcliffe’s novel
registers, but does not fully develop, growing anxieties regarding urban life. Of St. Aubert
the narrator relates that
16
He had known life in other forms than those of pastoral simplicity, having mingled in
the gay and in the busy scenes of the world; but the flattering portrait of mankind,
which his heart had delineated in early youth, his experience had too sorrowfully
corrected…he retired from the multitude, more in pity than in anger, to scenes of
simple nature, to the pure delights of literature, and to the exercise of domestic virtues
(1).
St. Aubert’s preference of “simple nature” to the world’s “busy scenes” foreshadows the
county/city dynamic to be developed in later texts, particularly in his close association of
nature and domestic virtue. Aubert’s “pity” of urban multitudes casts a negative light on
metropolitan life, an apprehension that becomes fully realized by the Urban Gothic novelists
of the 19th century. Anticipating this shift, and arguably influenced by Romantic focus on
Natural sublimity, in Udulpho, Radcliffe reconsiders the rural space as the seat of Gothic
terrors. The Natural environment, evocative in Vathek and Otranto of mystery and even
dread, is in Udolpho a potential source of pleasure. In their journey across the Alps to Italy,
Emily looks over the side of the precipice, “with her fears were mingled such various
emotions of delight, such admiration, astonishment, and awe, as she never experienced
before” (133). The iconic site of Gothic horror, the rural castle, is also described as both
menacing and beautiful—a Gothic transformed by the Romantic sublime.20 The narrator
notes that to Emily, “the Gothic greatness of [the castle’s] features… rendered it a gloomy
and sublime object” (179), a comment that reveals the shifting cultural perceptions of Gothic
terrors. The Monk, published two years after Udulpho, picks up on the changing Gothic
aesthetic and further moves the Gothic out of the woods and into the city.
A study of Lewis’s novel is central to a discussion on shifting Gothic aesthetics in the
18th century. Its terrors move from a rural German castle—the quintessential Gothic
backdrop—to a secluded monastery in the city of Madrid, ultimately breaking the walls of
the monastery and bleeding into the city proper. Key here is the inability of the rural space to
contain the menaces generated in remote settings. Unlike its predecessors, Lewis’s novel is
far less concerned with matters of domestic propriety and aristocracy; rather, the story
sensationalizes and sexualizes its terrors, capitalizing on the spectacle of monstrous bodies.
20
Wordsworth did, in fact, give a decaying castle the Romanic treatment in his Elegiac Stanzas Suggested
by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm, Painted by Sir George Beaumont (composed in 1805).
17
Retaining the Gothic archetypes of the pursued virginal maid and the licentious aggressor,
The Monk, tapping into Protestant anxieties regarding Catholic sexual repression, suggests
that repressed sexual desire leads not only to isolated deviant practices, but to the inevitable
spread of these threats into the city.21 The location of the novel’s tensions moves from
isolated settings to increasingly urban ones. This dynamic hints at the relocation of the
Gothic in the 19th century and shifting Gothic aesthetics. Agnes, failing to escape the castle
Lindenberg as the bleeding nun, is sent to the abbey in Madrid where she is tortured and
imprisoned for her illicit pregnancy. In his nearby cell, Ambrosio is seduced by Rosario, who
is revealed to be a woman, and later, Satan’s envoy. Having fulfilled his carnal desires with
the demon Matilda, “The Monk was glutted with the fullness of pleasure: A Week had
scarcely elapsed, before He was wearied of his Paramour” (312). Due to his increasing sexual
appetite, the Monk becomes taken with a beautiful young virgin; unable to contain himself,
he broke “his vow never to see the outside of the Abbey-walls” (318), leaving the confines of
the abbey to steel into Antonia’s home where he murders her mother. This significant
moment marks the movement of the novel’s horror from the confines of the monastery to the
city. The abbey walls cannot contain the monk’s illicit carnal desires; rather, one of the key
moments of horror in the novel is when Ambrosio steels into the urban space to spread his
malevolence outside of his natural boundaries. Like Frankenstein’s monster, Ambrosio
cannot be contained within his natural monastic domain. In Lewis, the Gothic infects the city,
yet unlike Frankenstein, is not fully constituted by it. The terrors of The Monk can’t be
contained within the abbey walls in the city; in Frankenstein, the Gothic horrors can’t be
contained within the city walls, nor controlled by Nature’s power.
It is within this context that I propose the Gothic novel makes a shift from rural to
urban space. Frankenstein inaugurates the 19th century movement of the Gothic from the
medieval ruins of Otranto and Udolpho to the urban city streets. While non-fictional texts
informed Gothic fears concerning urban growth—often appearing as descriptions of illness
and disease—in Shelley’s novel these fears put into question the very limits of Romanticism.
21
Steven Blackwell has in fact suggested that Lewis’s novel performs a Protestant Black Mass by
“conjuring up demonic powers and performing an ambiguous double screw of the subverted, feminized
con(texts) of his fallen Catholic world” (536).
18
Victor Frankenstein can be understood as having become victim to urban contamination both
physically and morally. This degradation results in the monstrous birth of the Creature, the
aesthetic personification of urban menace let loose from the confines of the city walls to
devastate the rural space. In Shelley’s novel, Nature, long identified with moral virtue,
domestic felicity, and Romantic idealism, is in direct opposition to the destructive excess of
the city, and rendered incapable of containing the dangers it poses. As the following chapter
will suggest, this dichotomy was largely constructed as part of a conversation developed in
less sensational texts.
19
CHAPTER 2
IMAGINING URBANITY
Beneath the pastoral images in Romantic writing lies an untapped fear connected to
social anxieties concerning urban development. Coleridge’s nightmare in The Pains of Sleep
(1802) centers on “a fiendish crowd,” which he describes as, “a trampling throng,/…Thirst of
revenge, the powerless will/…Fantastic passions! Maddening brawl!/ And shame and terror
over all! (18-26). Coleridge’s fear of “fiendish crowds” and “trampling throngs” was
common to Englishmen familiar with urban pedestrianism, particularly in light of the events
that took place in London and Birmingham over the previous decade. Urban menace was a
common motif throughout Romantic writing, and the anti-urban aesthetic was deeply
embedded within descriptions of Nature’s ennobling tranquility and transcendence. In book
seven of Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1805) he reflects on the three and a half months spent
in London in 1791, describing the violent London crowds as “[b]arbarian and Infernal—a
phantasma/ Monstrous in color, motion, shape, sight, sound!” (7.687). Wordsworth’s city is
personified as a monstrous phantasm, a source of terror and the epitome of Gothic horror.
But for Wordsworth—and for the Romantics preceding Mary Shelley—Nature’s “soul”
surmounts even London’s infernal crowds, endowing composure and serenity:
This did I feel, in London's vast domain.
The Spirit of Nature was upon me there;
The soul of Beauty and enduring Life
Vouchsafed her inspiration, and diffused,
Through meagre lines and colours, and the press
Of self-destroying, transitory things,
Composure, and ennobling Harmony (7.766-771).
20
Nature is here endowed with divine recuperative powers that are foreign to the urban
landscape. London itself is composed of “self-destroying, transitory things,” that are
remedied by the “ennobling Harmony” granted by “The spirit of Nature.” The Romantic
aesthetic, often identified by nature’s personification, is additionally distinguished by, as
Onno Oerlemans has observed, “its beauty and safety and its apparent freedom from human
domination” (30). Composed in 1797, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s This Lime-Tree Bower My
Prison, echoes Wordsworth’s sentiments on urban monstrosities, writing,
My gentle-hearted Charles! For though hast pined
And hungered after Nature, many a year,
In the great City pent, winning thy way
With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain
And strange calamity!22 (28-32)
Addressed to Charles Lamb following his visit in June of 1797 in the company William and
Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge reflects on Nature’s ability to “keep the heart/ Awake to
Love and Beauty! (63-64), in light of Lamb’s recent misfortunes in London.23 Coleridge
proposes that Nature will remedy the “evil and pain” Lamb contracted while “pent” in the
city. Implicit here is the dichotomy between the revitalizing Natural space and the evils
associated with extended exposure to the metropolis. Romanticism is, to some extent, a
reaction to growing concerns with London’s increasing size and hazards. Frankenstein can
be understood as showing the limits of the recuperative effects of Nature and thus paves the
way for an urban Gothic that is very different to the rural one found in Walpole and
Radcliffe. My aim in the following chapter is to situate Frankenstein within a historic,
literary conversation on urban representation. The threat of metropolitan development and
violence that writers in the 18th century had counted as part of urban amusements became, in
22
Lamb, however, was not so convinced. In a letter to Wordsworth dated January 30th 1801 he writes, “I
have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you
mountaineers can have with dead Nature.”
23
Lamb’s sister had, 10 months earlier, stabbed their mother to death “in a fit of insanity” (Abrams 421).
21
the context of the French Revolution and the English riots of the 1790s, a source of fear and
literary horrors. Romanticism, largely understood as a reaction to the sociopolitical
reformation of the 18th century, was also informed by growing anxieties regarding the
technological development and violence of 18th century London. 24When Shelley reimagines
the Gothic novel in 1818, she investigates the validity of the Romantic focus on Nature,
ultimately rendering the Romantic aesthetic unattainable.
English writers have long constructed the city and the country as opposing ideological
landscapes that evoke very different responses. Looking back on 18th century travel guides,
narratives that arose as a direct result of extensive demographic transformations, one finds
that the urban monstrosity that emerges at the turn of the century started life as humorous, if
often unpleasant, observations on urban pedestrianism. London was the commercial center of
18th century England, and the only metropolis of its size in Europe. It experienced
exponential growth and unprecedented development; London’s population grew from an
estimated 650,000 in 1750 to 1,000,000 people in 1800 (United Kingdom).25 London
remained the undisputed urban giant throughout much of the century, and representations of
city life in Britain were inevitably descriptions of London itself. As Alison O’Byrne has
noted, literature of this kind abounded, particularly guides to safely navigating the city
streets, avoiding sharpers, and effectively conducting business in the bustling and often
confusing capital.
By the early 19th century, as I will go on to argue, traversing the urban space had
become synonymous with exposure to filth, contamination, and other potential grievances.
Entertainment in the city was often characterized as violent. Bear, horse, and bull baiting
were common spectator sports, as were physical contests between men, women, and youths,
who bloodied each other for the amusement of the on-looking assembly. Such exchanges
were often reported in the local newspapers, delighting readers with details of the injured
persons. Public hangings attracted large crowds, entertaining Londoners with the spectacle of
24
See, for instance M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic
Literature (New York: Blackwell Publishing, 1971); Aiden Day, Romanticism (London: Routiedge, 1966);
Stuart Curran, ed. British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
25
By contrast, Paris, the next largest city in Europe, had only a half million inhabitants.
22
death. According to one account, after the heads of decapitated traitors were moved from
London Bridge to Temple Bar, a storm in March 1772 knocked over the unfortunate remains
of two Jacobites who were executed as traitors. Though reports describe women and men
shrieking and fainting at the sight, the infamous spikes weren’t removed until 30 years later
(Ackroyd, 285). Such accounts of city living from this period reveal a growing concern
regarding the menaces threatening urban pedestrians, which I suggest were part of a
discursive tradition that informed later Gothic novelists.
Of course, not everyone was concerned with these. With tongue firmly in cheek,
Robert Randal begins his preface to Excursion Round London (1776) with an address to his
competitors:
There have been several publications whose chief objects were the arts, cheats,
designs, and various deceptions of the metropolis, but they are generally allowed to
be deficient…the Author of the following sheet, was not only a more ingenious, but a
more ingenuous rambler: he left his country friends in order to oblige, instruct, and
entertain them (vi).
As this account indicates, early guides to the city were often intended for country readership,
and warned newcomers to London of urban hazards while entertaining them in the process.
Randal’s Excursion is dedicated to “the Country Gentleman of Great Britain…written for
their amusement and instruction, and to warn them of dangers.” His guide, a series of letters
between him and John Trusty, details first-hand accounts of a country-dweller’s experience
navigating the city. In another work, The Countryman’s Guide to London or Villainy
Detected (1775), the title page claims to “enable the most innocent country people to be
sufficiently on their guard,” so as, “to avoid the base impositions of such vile and abandoned
artists, who live by robbing and ruining the young and innocent of both sexes” (Cooke). The
author lists highwaymen, scamps, gamblers, whores, false friends, gossips, pimps and
fortune-tellers among those to be avoided, implicitly suggesting that such unsavory types of
individuals would be unknown, or at the least, far less of a menace, to a rural reader. This
text further differentiates between urban and the rural anxieties by pointing out, “[t]hough to
be ignorant of the various forms of fraud and deceit practiced in this busy scene of things,
may be deemed some part of the happiness of rural life; yet if the inexperienced countryman
embarks in this maze of perplexity, without caution against its various chicaneries, that very
23
ignorance may prove his bane” (ii). By comparison, rural life is characterized by its freedom
from the frauds and deceits typical of the city. Anticipating Shelley’s dichotomy between
rural and urban space, in its earliest incarnation, this contrast was made to delight and
acquaint country travelers with the dodgy nuances of the city. Randal’s text, enticing readers
with its description of metropolitan scandals and cheats, presents to its audience a first-hand
account of urban travels with the intent of instructing and entertaining his audience. In his
Excursion, Randal expresses no fear of the city, but rather a diverted, if occasionally
disgusted, amusement. Later accounts of urban pedestrianism are marked by increasingly
cautionary reports of violence, unsanitary conditions, and ever-present pestilence. But despite
potential dangers, Randal’s Excursion, like Tobias Smollet’s 1771 The Expedition of
Humphry Clinker, is dominated by amused spectatorship. In a letter, Randal cheerfully
writes, “How wonderfully the city differs from the country in respect to points of carnal
amusement” (32), going on to discuss in great detail the ease with which a prostitute can be
procured. Death and disease were commonplace in London, as Trusty writes “Ah, Frank,
Frank—hanging, drowning, cutting throats, dying, damning, and everything is going forward
in this fame city of London” (40). Regardless of the presence of scoundrels and fatalities,
Randal concludes his guide of London favorably. In what might best encapsulate his view of
the city itself, he writes, “I have had a peep at the Court, that circle of whim and wickedness,
gaiety and giddiness, melancholy and merriment, folly and falsehood” (137). This laissezfaire attitude towards the city’s hazards was prevalent until the end of the 1770s, when urban
amusements became more dangerous, and were subsequently represented in literature as
metropolitan terrors in the context of the anxieties generated by the Gordon Riots, and
secondly, and more forcefully, by the French Revolution.
London crowds were infamous for their irritable and volatile nature. A letter in
Excursion describes a public hanging in which the body was plundered by pick-pockets and
thieves right after the hangman had done his work. “Upon our going away,” Trusty relates,
“the mob began to be quarrelsome; and after that we were pelted with dead cats, rotten eggs,
and all manner of vermin. Such, Frank, is the holiday manner in which your Cocknies amuse
themselves” (42). Yet despite—or perhaps as a result of—the seemingly endless list of urban
hazards, the tone of guide literature, as indicated by the rhyme above and Trusty’s wry
reflections, was still decidedly comic.
24
Numerous texts elucidate the ruses common to the city, particularly those by sharpers,
setters, spungers, money-droppers, pick-pockets, and other thieves. These deceptive
individuals often appear as gentleman, and, like the city itself, present illusive and obscure
threats. In Cooke’s Countryman’s Guide, the author devotes a section to sharpers, describing
men whose fortunes and reputations have fallen by the wayside, and in an effort to redeem
their loss, prey upon “young heirs of much wealth, and less prudence, who having left their
rural abodes, and being captivated with the novelty of town life, often affect the company of
those who, according to the common phrase, are said to “know life” (2-3). The 18th century
equivalent of the pool shark, sharpers will play their naïve acquaintances at games such as
billiards, bowling, and tennis, which they have already mastered, winning money through
gambling. “In short,” Cooke concludes of them, “take nothing on trust, nor make any
acquaintance till assured of their way of life and moral character” (5). As Cooke
demonstrates, one of the primary concerns when traveling through London is the abundance
of immoral characters. The city is rife with “vicious and abandoned characters” (Cooke iii)
and as a result, to navigate the city safely is to be consistently doubtful of the character of
anyone to make your acquaintance. Cooke ultimately advises, “If any one behaves with
extraordinary civility towards you, or affects to desire your friendship beware of him, listen
not to his enticements, for as you are a stranger to him, his desire of cultivating an
acquaintance with you must arise from base or selfish views” (4). In a letter to his brothers,
Randal writes of the city, “It does not ask for any great genius to observe, that the city of
London is more full of scramblers, cheats, villains, and imposters, than any other in Europe”
(87). Urban myths and legends abounded. According to Trusler, kidnappers, posing as pub
comrades, will buy the victims drinks, only to have them awake from the evening’s ordeal in
a state of slavery, forced to purchase their freedom at extortionate rates. Setters, a group that
Cooke regards with particular aversion, were commonly held to trick young heirs into
marriage. Describing them as “servile, despicable wretches, capable of every action base and
sordid,” the setter watches for naïve and wealthy visitors to the city and, “[imposes] upon
them jilts and whores for women of character and fortune” (15). For the country gentleman,
the city is home to innumerable frauds and deceits; only the savviest city-dweller can
navigate the urban terrain successfully. Guide literature serves to warn the rural visitors of
25
urban hazards, and to establish the city as a space of menace and misfortune. This is
especially true of urban decadence and debauchery.
In addition to fraud, the guides of the 18th century also describe the potential for even
the most morally upright country person to fall prey to the indulgence of vice. The city is full
of moral contaminants, each one threatening to infect the very character of the rural visitor.
As discussed above, gambling was a major form of entertainment for the gentry and
bourgeois alike. Peter Ackroyd has captured this moment in his book London: The
Biography, noting that “[d]rink, sex, and violence one always consorted together. They were
the trinity of London vice and weakness, an unholy threesome which disported happily
across the city” (377). Gaming houses attracted patrons from all walks of life. Frequented by
thieves and sharpers, gaming houses were an easy way to lose one’s money and reputation.
Recalling the language of Defoe, Randal writes of his visit to such an establishment, “A
gaming-house, my dear cousin, is like the grave, which confounds all ranks, and reduces all
to a level. Villainy, scoundrelism, knavery, and cunning…shall insist upon their lead,
through all stars and garters to stare them in the face. See how they all mix together –no
difference, no subordinations, no distinctions!” (71). Devoting nine pages to the menace of
the gambling hall, Cooke concedes that most games are “practiced by men of principle for
diversion only” (7), but a country visitor to the city with little acquaintance with gaming
provides too attractive an opportunity for a London gambler, and thus become targets of
various schemes, some fatal. Cooke and his contemporaries construct an opposition between
urban and rural space; the latter is a site presumably free of the menaces that characterize
urban life, and as such, outsiders to the city require textual representations in order to
understand the foreign hazards associated with moving through the city.
Critical to a discussion on metropolitan dangers of the 18th century are disease and
illness. As I will go on to argue, one of the primary ways in which urban menace is
constructed is in terms of infection and contamination. In his chapter entitled “A Plague
Upon You” Ackroyd notes, “Much has been written about the nature of fear in London,”
citing James Boswell’s observations upon arriving in London in 1762, “I began to be
apprehensive that I was taking a nervous fever, a supposition not improbable, as I had one
after such an illness when I was last in London” (cited in Ackroyd, 192). Ackroyd attributes
people’s fear of the city to the common presence of pestilence, in addition to the noise,
26
violence, and general urban commotion. Epidemics were common, as was suicide. The
plague visited the city as early as the 7th century, returning in 1348, 1528, 1563, 1603, and
1664-1666 (194), the latter dates famously recorded in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the
Plague Year. Thousands perished in the plagues, at least 70,000 people in the 18 months
following the 1664 outbreak alone. Two years later, London was visited by the Great Fire,
the conflagration which burned for four days in September of 1666, destroying eighty percent of the urban area (Panton 13). Death and misery were synonymous with the city of
London at these times, and images abound in literature of the bodies being carried out to be
buried in massive graves. Though the plague did not return to London thereafter, and 18th
texts such as Humphry Clinker and The Countryman’s Guide largely regarded the city with
delight rather than fear, the metaphor of the metropolis as source of contamination was
echoed in the works of writers for centuries thereafter. As Roger Lund has suggested,
metaphors of disease and contagion were often used by writers in the 18th century to express
their fear of perceived threats such as atheism or social corruption (46-48), a dynamic that I
will argue was echoed in Frankenstein.
In addition to non-fictional works on urban pedestrianism, the novel was similarly
affected by metropolitan development and the social anxieties that resulted. The comparison
between urban horrors and rural pleasures is central to Smollett’s novel, informing writers
like Godwin and Holcroft in the years that followed. Matthew Bramble’s often hilarious
observations in Humphry Clinker provide a unique insight into British life in the 1760’s and
more specifically into cultural perspectives on urban traveling. Throughout the novel there
are moments of significant threat; however, the overall tone is one of amusement and
diversion. Smollett constructs Bramble as equal parts droll and cantankerous, as aptly
observed by his nephew Melford, “He is the most risible misanthrope I ever met with” (43).
Bramble’s negative comments regarding the city are related in a whimsical tone that nearly
belies his assertions of danger and disease. Though the city is described as menacing,
Smollett’s characters generally embody the same diverted revulsion that is exhibited in
Randal. Melford notes, “This is what my uncle reprobates, as a monstrous jumble of
heterogeneous principles; a vile mob of noise and impertinence, without decency or
subordination. But this chaos is to me a source of infinite amusement” (43). But the
27
amusements the city offers are accompanied its perils. Bramble describes London itself as
monstrous:
[T]he capital is become an overgrown monster; which, like a dropsical head, will in
time leave the body and extremities without nourishment and support. The absurdity
will appear in its full force, when we consider that one sixth part of the natives of this
whole extensive kingdom is crowded within the bills of mortality (79).
Bramble depicts London as excessively swollen and ailing, its concentrated population
threatening the very kingdom itself. The anxieties that lead to this diagnosis are explored in
this chapter, as Bramble describes the lure of wealth, and its destructive consequences. Like
Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding, Smollett’s Bramble suggests that the idle working-class
deserts its dismal rural employments and flocks to the city of London in hopes of finding
opportunity.26 “Great numbers of these,” he states, “being disappointed in their expectation,
become thieves and sharpers; and London being an immense wilderness…affords them
lurking places as well as prey” (80). This concern is also present in Wollstonecraft’s Letters
Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, which reveal the
almost complete disjunction between rural poverty and urban extravagance that is the mark
of much 18th century writing. In Letter three, for instance, Wollstonecraft notes of her time
in Sweden, “The country is, perhaps, too thinly inhabited to produce many of that description
of thieves termed footpads, or highwaymen. They are usually the spawn of great cities—the
effect of the spurious desires generated by wealth, rather than the desperate struggles of
poverty to escape from misery” (29). Wollstonecraft echoes Smollett’s understanding of the
city as a place in which “spurious desires” are generated by “wealth” rather than “poverty.”
Like Godwin’s novels St. Leon and Caleb Williams, Smollett’s text is concerned
with the city’s lack of social distinction and hierarchy: “The different departments of life are
jumbled together…crashing in one vile ferment of stupidity and corruption (80-81).27 London
is a place filled with deceivers that mingle with the moral, mechanics that mingle with
courtiers. Part of the city’s monstrosity lies in its lack of social division and abundance of
26
27
See Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Fielding’s Tom Jones.
In the Countryman’s Guide, Cooke found this to be particularly the case in gaming houses, an
observation that did little to reduce their charms (73).
28
working-class individuals. This particular urban threat is one that undermines notions of class
structure and separation. In addition to the city itself, the urban population is deemed
menacing, what Bramble calls an “incongruous monster, called the public” (81). He goes on
with relish, reflecting, “When I see a man of birth, education, and fortune, put himself on a
level with the dregs of the people, mingle with low mechanics, feed with them at the same
board…I cannot help despising him, as a man guilty of the vilest prostitution” (96). This
menace associated with class mingling is compounded by the pervasive and infectious nature
of London. Bramble’s solemn reflections hint at the genuine concerns with urban expansion
developed in the 19th century. But here, Smollett’s illusions are couched in Bramble’s comic
intuitions rather than, as we see in Shelley, indications of legitimate social anxieties.
Throughout the novel Smollett reflects on metropolitan infection. Alluding to urban
degradation of morality, Bramble notes, “I have seen some old friends, who constantly
resided in this virtuous metropolis, but they are so changed in manners and disposition, that
we hardly know or care for one another” (82). Literal infection is also a concern. In the city
of Bath, which is regarded as a metropolis28, Bramble recounts his time in the Roman baths
with particular disgust. From the bathers, to the drinking water, to the crowds, Bramble finds
nothing pleasurable in the city, and fears (if exaggerated for comic effect) the threat of
infection and disease. Bramble writes, “Snares are laid for our lives in every thing we eat or
drink: the very air we breathe, is loaded with contagion. We cannot even sleep, without risk
of infection. I say infection – This place is the rendezvous of the diseased” (76). Bramble’s
description of urban contamination is here quite literal; the city is a place of disease and
infection. We have seen this notion taken up by Wollstonecraft in her description of the city’s
“spawn,” and what is perhaps most interesting is the oppositional comparison on the part of
both writers between the rural and urban space. In both travelogues the authors express their
preference for the country, citing the reanimating affects of Nature on spirit and body. Just as
Wollstonecraft relates “that the most genial and humane characters I have met with in life
were most alive to the sentiments inspired by tranquil country scenes” (letter XI), within
Smollet’s text Bramble writes,
28
When in the city, Matthew Bramble mentions his friend Quin, whom he refers to as “as citizen of this
metropolis” (208).
29
Imagine to yourself a high exalted essence of mingled odours, arising from putrid
gums, imposthumated lungs, sour flatulencies, rank armpits, sweating feet, running
sores and issues, plasters, ointments…besides a thousand frowzy steams, which I
could not analyse…Such is the atmosphere I have exchanged for the pure, elastic,
animating air of the Welsh mountains – O Rus, quando te aspiciam!29 (59).
The scene Bramble describes a ball in the city, which he associates with the excesses of
gluttony, consumption of luxuries, and debauch. Smollet’s text reveals a dichotomous
construction of rural versus urban, the health-promoting country and the degenerative excess
of the city. The infectious longing for wealth, as noted by Wollstonecraft, becomes literally
embodied in the stench at Bramble’s ball. These contaminating luxuries lead to excessive
desire, which, in the case of Victor Frankenstein, I will suggest ultimately results in the
creation of monstrosity. As in Godwin’s St. Leon, the city is a source of contamination that
becomes physically manifested. Relating his time in Bath, Bramble claims that the bathing
waters do nothing to remedy the ill-health caused by urban living, writing, “even this boasted
corrector cannot prevent those languid, sallow looks, that distinguish the inhabitants of
London from those ruddy swains that lead a country-life” (110-111). London, and by
extension, the urban space, is a site of monstrous contagion and degeneration, a diagnosis
registered throughout Frankenstein. The deterioration of Frankenstein’s health in the city can
be seen as part of a critical conversation regarding the infectious nature of the metropolis.
Though Humphrey Clinker is a comic critique of human nature, its darker undertones
anticipate the far less amused portraits of urban life in the following decades.
The 1780’s inaugurated a period in London’s history characterized by fear of social
revolution, large-scale demographic changes, and industrialization. Subsequently, the
menaces of the city were no longer regarded with amused derision alone. Angry and unruly
mobs were a common sight in London, and riots could be deadly. The Gordon Riots of 1780,
which began as an anti-catholic demonstration, escalated into a five-day assault upon the
city. Led by President of the Protestant Association Lord George Gordon, a mob estimated to
be 50,000 strong marched to the House of Commons with a petition to repeal legislature
passed to mitigate anti-Catholic laws. In his A Plain and Succinct Narrative of the Late Riots
29
From the book notes: Horace, Satires, 2, 6, 60; O country house, when shall I behold you!
30
and Disturbances in the Cities, Holcroft recalls that after an unsuccessful attempt on the
House of Lords on Friday, June 2nd, the mob retaliated by attacking the unfortunate council
members who happened upon the assembly on Parliament Street. Lord Bathurst, the
President of the Council, was “kicked violently in the legs,” while Lord Mansfield, “had the
glasses of his carriage broken, and the panels beat in, and narrowly escaped with his life”
(17). On departing from the House, the mob dispersed to other parts of the city, and officials
believed the worst was over. But as Holcroft relates, the violence only intensified in the days
that followed:
The conclusion of this evening’s disturbance may be said, to be only the beginning of
these dreadful scenes of desolation which have since ensued; and which when the
perpetrators are long suck into oblivion, shall be recorded as some of the most
unparalleled and daring outrages history can furnish (23).
On Sunday the rioters reassembled, targeting predominately Catholic churches and
neighborhoods, such as the poor Irish community of Moorfields. Over the course of the
following days, rioters destroyed Catholic chapels and homes, breaking into both the New
Prison at Clerkenwell and Newgate, freeing their confined comrades and setting fire to
everything in their path. Recalling the events of Monday the 5th, Holcroft recalls, “All ranks
of people began to be exceedingly terrified at the lawless proceedings of this day and
numbers but blue cockades in their hats…on purpose to avoid personal injury and insult”
(26). The blue cockade, symbol of the Protestant Association, became that week an emblem
of religious intolerance and violence. On the final night of the riots, Holcroft describes the
unimaginable horror of the chaos and fear in London. Noting that it is “impossible to give
any adequate description of the events of Wednesday,” Holcroft chillingly reflects that, “[a]
universal stupor had seized the minds of men” (31). Watching the fire engulf various parts of
the city, fueled by the liquor distillery belonging to Mr. Langdale, Holcroft recalls the
apocalyptic scene:
[T]he conflagration was horrible beyond description…It is easy to conceive what fury
[the liquors] would add to the flames; but to form an adequate idea of the distress of
the neighboring inhabitants, or indeed of the inhabitants in every part of the city, is
not so easy. Men, women, and children were running up and down with beds, glasses,
bundles, or whatever they wished most to preserve…in short, every thing which could
impress the mind with ideas of universal anarchy, and approaching desolation,
31
seemed to be accumulating. Sleep and rest were things not thought of; the streets
were swarming with people, and uproar, confusion, and terror reigned in every part
(32-33) [sic].
The image of London as desolate and terrifying was no doubt impressed upon the minds of
English writers for years to come. But the physical destruction of the city was compounded
by the ideological anxieties that arose as a result of the State’s inability to maintain the peace,
and by extension, to protect civil liberties. Holcroft notes that the events of Tuesday inspired
fear “not only for the safety of the city, but for the constitution, for the kingdom, for
property, liberty and life, and for everything that is dear to society, or to Englishmen” (26). In
the aftermath of the riots, he concedes that while martial law was not rigorously enforced,
“the being but an hour under the control of a Military Force, was humiliating, derogatory,
and alarming” (41). The loss of civil liberties as a result of civil unrest created a philosophic
dilemma centered on questions of public disturbances and government involvement. The
repercussions of these events can even be located in guide literature. The Reverend Dr. John
Trusler’s London Adviser and Guide that was published in 1786 differs a great deal in tone
from previous publications of its kind. Rather than the narrative quality of Cooke and
Randal’s work, Trusler’s Guide methodically details the judicial process accorded particular
grievances. In his chapter titled “Nusances” [sic], Trusler notes, “Where a man is threatened
to be beaten, or can swear that he goes in fear of his life, he may, before a justice, bind his
adversary over to keep the peace” (140). In similar fashion, his chapter “On Walking London
Streets” numerically lists, rather than gives a first-hand account, of pedestrian menaces,
warning travelers to mind their feet when crossing the street, “lest you be crushed” (123) by a
passing cart or carriage, and to “be careful not to take too much money,” as “there are thieves
frequently waiting at the outskirts of town, particularly in the evening” (156). His tract goes
on to list a multitude of potential grievances such as “pigeons, pigs, foul drains, privies,
overflowing cisterns, rotten water-pipes, decayed vegetables thrown out in footways,
obstructions in foot-ways, flowerpots dropping on people’s heads, &c” (142). As Trusler and
his contemporaries indicate, the city was a place where one had to maintain constant
vigilance at the risk of his or her pocket-money and person. But unlike preceding accounts,
Trusler’s advocation of pedestrian diligence is distinctly more immediate, and more
frightening, grounded in potential judicial remonstrations.
32
On July 14th of 1791, the same year Wordsworth spent four months in London,
Joseph Priestley, a well-known scientist, political dissenter and Lunar Society member was
forced to flee his home and laboratory as rioters looted his estate and burned it to the ground.
The three days that followed became known as the Priestley, or Birmingham riots. In his An
Appeal to the Public on the Subject of the Riots in Birmingham, Priestley indicts the
government officials who fueled public intolerance against dissenters and instigated the
violence, noting, “That there were instigators, as well as perpetrators, of these horrid scenes,
was sufficiently evident” (34). The government’s failure to contain the riots in London is in
Birmingham made more horrifying by the perpetuation of anti-dissenter attitudes and
aggression. Priestley argues,
The Country does not yet sufficiently feel disgrace that has been done to it, and great
numbers rather exult in our sufferings, so that we are far from thinking ourselves
secure from further injuries. Many persons not only express no disapprobation of our
sufferings, or of the illegal manner in which they were inflicted, but plainly enough
threaten us with more outrages of the same kind” (x-xi).
The hostility and threat of physical harm to the dissenting community, particularly those
involved in the cause of political, social, and religious reform, is key to understanding
anxieties concerning urban menace. The threat of mob brutality resonated with Wordsworth,
a revolutionary sympathizer himself, who reflects on London riots in book 7 of The Prelude:
…What say you, then,
To times, when half the city shall break out
Full of one passion, vengeance, rage, or fear?
To executions, to a street on fire,
Mobs, riots, or rejoicings? (7.671-675).
The city, characterized by its eruptions of violent passions and mob riots, is the antithesis of
the Romantic aesthetic, identified by the absence of metropolitan concerns and focus on
solitary commune with Nature and pastoral landscapes. In addition to the Romantic
sensibilities inherited from Wordsworth and Coleridge, the Gothic sensibility of
Frankenstein is moderated—and sometimes even augmented—by the socio-political
33
concerns Mary Shelley inherited from her parents and contemporaries. Indeed, the urban
anxieties evident in her work, which pick up on the concerns of Caleb Williams, Hugh
Trevor, and St. Leon, can even be discerned in embryonic form in the works of an even
earlier novelist, Tobias Smollett. But what in the 1770s was primarily an occasion for social
comedy became—in the context of the fears and anxieties generated by the French
Revolution—a source of terror on a par with anything imagined by Walpole or Reeves.30 As
Barbara Darby has observed in her exploration of 1790s spectacle and tragedy, “images and
the plots of upheaval and insurrection connected with them were depicted overtly or mapped
onto the characters and stories of history” (575). Prior to the emergence in Gothic literature
of urban terrors associated with political upheaval, Smollett’s diagnosis of the city as
infectious is informed by a general concern with urban sanitation, moral degeneration, and
metropolitan vice, all of which play a role in the construction of Shelley’s monster, and the
inspiration for Frankenstein’s workshop of horrors.
There was an explosion of Gothic texts in the 1790’s concerned with the city. These
texts, rife with allusions to urban monstrosity, share little of the amused diversion in
Smollett. 31 Rather, in the decade following the Birmingham Riots, cultural anxieties
concerning urbanity were decidedly bleaker, occupied with the terrors of revolution and
political turmoil. William Blake’s “London” (1794) recalls the urban menace registered in
the preceding decades, yet reveals a portrait of subjugation and despair not yet accounted for.
Like Blake, Thomas Holcroft considers the dilemma of urban decay and its consequences for
society. His novel Hugh Trevor (1794) tells the story of a young man’s struggle for sincerity
and truth in an immoral urban environment. Unlike Matthew Bramble, the evils of the city
overwhelm any of Trevor’s foreknowledge, and he quickly discovers “that men are not all as
good as they might be; and…that I was not quite so wise as I had supposed myself (85).
30
One particular important event was the Birmingham Riots of 1791, which targeted religious dissenters
and supporters of the French Revolution, most notably Lunar Society member and clergyman Joseph Priestley.
A friend of William Godwin’s, Priestley was in correspondence with Godwin in the tumultuous years following
the riots and prior to the publication of Caleb Williams. In his journal dated March 23rd, 1793 Godwin writes,
“Dr. Priestley says my book contains a vast extent of ability—Monarchy and Aristocracy, to be sure, were never
so painted before” (in Paul, 116).
31
Another writer famous for his satiric fiction on London is John Gay, whose Trivia or the Art of Walking
the Streets of London (1716), is an often hilarious poem detailing the woes of urban navigation.
34
Trevor represents the traveler, who, like Smollett’s nephew Melford, is delighted with the
city despite his knowledge of its dangers. But for Holcroft, the amusements the city offers are
overpowered by the corrupting nature of its vices. In his novel, even the sincerest man,
armed with an understanding of the city’s vices, can fall prey to the subtle dangers of the
urban space. Holcroft disrupts any romantic idealizations of the city, replacing them with an
image of its sinister, malevolent underbelly.
Leaving his rural home, Hugh Trevor enters his first city with great optimism, “Oh
Oxford, said I, thou art the seat of the muses…I own my expectations were high” (74). Once
arrived, Trevor exclaims (in a tone perhaps exaggerated for effect), “It is all that I had
imagined,” said I, “and much much more! Happy city, happy people, and happy I, that am
come to be one among you! Now and now only I begin to live” (75). A precursor to his
London experiences, the smaller city sets the tone for Trevor’s urban adventure. Within a
moment Trevor is appalled by the profanities, “vulgar oaths”, he hears in the street, and the
coarse manners of the students, which elicits a choked, “The beauties of Oxford were
vanished! I was awakened from the most delightful of dreams to a disgusting reality, and
would have given kingdoms to have once more renewed my trance” (76). Trevor’s arrival in
the city is accompanied by an initiation into urban excess and depravity. Invited to supper
with his Lord and squires, Trevor is “plied to drink” (79) passing out on the hearth; he
awakens feeling shameful of his participation in the “debauch” (80). Trevor’s
disenchantment with the city of Oxford is only surpassed by his misadventures in London.
He begins his narrative of his time in the city of London noting:
I did not, as at Oxford, expect to find its inhabitants all saints. No: I had heard much
of their vices. The subtle and ingenious arts, by which they trick and prey upon each
other, had been pictured to me as highly dangerous…But fore warned, said I, fore
armed: and that I was not easily to be circumvented was still a part of my creed (99).
Despite his disenchantment with Oxford, and his acquaintance with London menace, Trevor
imagines that the great city will not disappoint his expectations. Holcroft evokes the same
exaggeration from Trevor’s earlier arrival, “Imagination conjured up a mass that was all
magnificence! The world till now had to me been sleeping; here only men were alive!” (99).
But as in London, Trevor is quickly disabused of his initial romance with Oxford. Spotting
what he imagines might be sharpers, he is assaulted by two men who, “threw [him] flat on
35
the pavement, and hurt [him] considerably” (100). Soon after Trevor discovers that the
contents of his pockets were gone. His violent induction into London and Oxford is evidence
of Holcroft’s rejection of the urban landscape as a source of the amused aversion evidenced
in earlier texts. Rather, the depravity that Trevor encounters reveals a growing concern with
the violence and vice in the city. Holcroft’s descriptions of urban mobs in particular seem to
reflect the brutality of Parisian rioters, and, more immediately, the Priestley Riots of 1791.
Having mistakenly accused a stranger of stealing his handkerchief, Trevor inspires a brutal
mêlée:
The man whom I had falsely accused made a violent resistance; the mob was
dragging him along, rending his clothes off his back, and half-tearing him in pieces.
The state of my mind was little short of frenzy. In a tone of command, I bade
Belmont follow, made my way into the thickest of the croud, and furiously began to
beat the people who were ill-using the prisoner; calling till I was hoarse, 'Let him
alone! He is innocent! I am to blame!'
My efforts were vain. A mob has many hands but no ears. My blows were returned
fifty fold. I was inveloped by one mob myself, while the poor wretch was hauled
along by another. Not all my struggles could save him. I could not get free; and the
man, as Belmost afterward informed me, was half drowned; after which he escaped,
and nobody knew what was become of him (264-265).
Unlike in Cooke’s Countryman’s Guide or Randal’s Excursion Round London published a
year later, Holcroft’s crowds pose far more danger to the urban pedestrian than the risk of
being pick pocketed or being pelted with vermin.32 By the time Hugh Trevor is published in
1794, there is a distinct shift in the social consciousness regarding notions of urban menace.
Darby extends this recognition of urban danger to visual and stage culture, noting that
“[s]cenes of rebellious mobs, violent in their intent, were part of the visual culture of the
revolutionary years, represented in paintings such as Zoffany’s Invasion of the Cellars of the
Louvre (1795) and other engravings of crowds” (586). Trevor experiences numerous physical
32
After watching a public hanging, Randal’s Countyman’s Guide notes, “Upon our going away the mob
began to be quarrelsome; and after that we were pelted with dead cats, rotten eggs, and all manner of vermin.
Such, Frank, is the holiday manner in which your Cocknies amuse themselves” (42).
36
and psychological encounters in the city that threaten his life and wellbeing, despite his
recognition of potential dangers. Holcroft demonstrates that guide literature does little to
protect the pedestrian from urban menaces, as the city is far more dangerous than can be
accounted for, in spite of preparation.
Like his friend and fellow Jacobin Thomas Holcroft, William Godwin’s fiction
reflects a distinct concern with the menace posed by the city. As Richard Lehan has noted,
Godwin’s Caleb Williams “[connects] the passing of the estate with an evil emanating in the
city” (37). However, though Shelley draws a number of themes from Godwin’s work, as I
will demonstrate, she arrives at very different conclusions. When Caleb discovers that his
master Falkland has committed a murder and allowed an innocent man to hang for it, Caleb
flees Falkland’s estate, only to be pursued wherever he goes. In Godwin’s novel, the urban
space, metaphorically represented by London, is everywhere that Falkland’s rural estate is
not. Like his contemporary Holcroft, Godwin’s London presents a menace that clearly
diverges from earlier representations of the city. Escaping Falkland’s estate, Caleb plans to
go to London, noting “[t] here I believed I should be most safe from discovery, if the
vengeance of Mr. Falkland should prompt him to pursue me; and I did not doubt, among the
multiplied resources of the metropolis33, to find something which should suggest to me an
eligible mode of disposing of my person and industry (214). Recalling Hugh Trevor, Caleb’s
expectation of the city is disappointed by its grim reality. Expecting to find himself safe
within the crowded London streets, he instead finds himself under constant surveillance.
Having destroyed Caleb’s reputation, Falkland’s ubiquitous presence overcomes any
prospect of concealment. Godwin creates an urban environment that overwhelms the
possibility of a distinction between the public and the private sphere, as England’s radicals
had themselves personally experienced. Exhausted from Falkland’s machinations, Caleb
concedes, “Disguise was no longer of use. A numerous class of individuals, through every
department, almost every house of the metropolis, would be induced to look with a
suspicious eye upon every stranger, especially every solitary stranger, that fell under their
33
Metropolitan anonymity was regarded by Wordsworth with derision, noting in The Prelude, “’The face
of everyone/ That passes by me is a mystery!’/ Thus have I looked, nor ceased to look, oppressed/ By thoughts
of what and whither” (28-31)
37
observation” (373). Caleb’s lack of ideological freedom (Hogle, The Cambridge Companion
49) and his subsequent paranoia adds another dimension to the urban Gothic, one that is
revisited in St. Leon.34
Following the critical success of Caleb Williams, Godwin published St. Leon
(1799), a novel that explores the psychological and demoralizing effects of the city. St. Leon
is both a morality tale regarding the dangers of excessive ambition for wealth, and a Gothic
tale regarding the infectious nature of urban excess. St. Leon finds domestic felicity living
with his wife and children in the tranquil and secluded French countryside. It is when he
brings his son to be educated in Paris that St. Leon finds himself unable to reconcile his
domestic duties with his desire to obtain wealth and privilege. Godwin’s novel depicts the
urban space as an initial contaminant that corrupts the character of St. Leon and leads him to
disregard his familial obligations, resulting in a lifetime of abject discontentment. Situated in
the company of Parisian society and exposed to the luxuries he had forgotten, St. Leon
forgets his domestic duties.
The scenes of St. Leon, its fields, its walks, its woods and its streams, faded from my
mind. I forgot the pleasure with which I had viewed my children sporting on the
green, and the delicious, rural suppers which I had so often partaken with my wife
beneath my vines and my fig-trees at the period of the setting sun. When I set out for
Paris, these images had dwelt upon my mind, and saddened my fancy. At every stage
I felt myself removed still further from the scene where my treasures and my
affections were deposited (50).
The urban environment (as recalled in Wollstonecraft and Smollett) is associated with the
contaminating luxuries that lead to excessive desire for wealth, which ultimately destroys the
possibility of conjugal happiness. Godwin appears to embrace the importance of domestic
affections over personal ambition. In St. Leon, he proposes that the excessive desires inspired
by the urban space are both infectious and degenerative.
St Leon’s fate is sealed at the gaming tables in Paris. Gaming is associated with
disease and contamination, as Godwin writes of St. Leon’s fellow players, “they were in
34
For critics that have treated Caleb Williams as a Gothic text, see Vijay Mishra’s The Gothic Sublime
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), and Donna Heiland’s compelling section “William
Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Uncanny” in her book Gothic and Gender: an Introduction (Malden,
Blackwell Publishing, 2004).
38
some degree infected with the venom of gaming, their infection was not so deep as mine nor
with such desperation of thought (55). After gambling away his fortune, St. Leon and his
family are removed to a rural cottage in Switzerland. Though finally having achieved
domestic felicity and rejuvenated health in their isolation, St. Leon becomes immune to
Nature’s healing properties at the discovery of the Philosopher’s Stone.35 Godwin links
ambitious excess with domestic deterioration and an inability to be transformed by rural
solitude, an insight later developed by his daughter. St. Leon notes, “I was not formed to
enjoy a scene of pastoral simplicity. Ambition still haunted me, an uneasiness” (178).
Anticipating Victor Frankenstein’s inability to find peace in pastoral landscapes, St. Leon’s
desire for knowledge and wealth supersedes his desire to restore domestic felicity.
Questioning the family’s sudden rise to wealth, and his father’s change in character, Charles
exclaims, “Oh, my father, how is your character changed and subverted” (192). The desire
for wealth has forced St. Leon to engage in clandestine promises, a degradation of his once
uncorrupted character. Charles recognizes his father’s extreme prosperity as infectious,
noting, “It is this wealth, with whose splendor I was at first child enough to be dazzled, that
has destroyed us. My fingers shall not be contaminated with an atom of it” (194). Losing his
child, and later, his wife, St. Leon becomes a testament to the infectious dangers of urban
vice. In his novels, Godwin constructs the city as both a place of violence and depravity, as
well as infectious immoral disease. The terrors of St. Leon are, however, controlled within a
broad Romantic aesthetic. The urban menace is violent and destructive, yet still manageable.
Despite having orchestrated the downfall of his marriage, St. Leon manages to find a
measure of domestic felicity in the marriage and happiness of his son. “I was the hero’s
father!...I am happy to close my eventful and melancholy story with so pleasing a
termination” (478). Though Godwin’s narrative eventually reconciles personal ambition with
domestic felicity, St. Leon retains the ability to create immeasurable wealth and live forever.
He finds something yet to live for, and gains virtue in the moral righteousness of his son.
Unlike her father’s work, in Shelley’s rerendering of the Gothic, the infectious menaces of
the urban space are uncontainable, and the sins visited upon domestic virtues are
35
An idea picked up in Frankenstein
39
irredeemable. As critics have offered, Frankenstein is a critique of Godwinian philosophy,
particularly concerning the importance of domestic happiness over personal ambition and, as
Sterrenburg adds, Godwin’s “utopian speculations on human immorality” (149). In
Frankenstein, Shelley draws on Godwin’s preoccupation with metropolitan surveillance and
isolation, developing the hints of urban terror in St. Leon. The infectious menace of the city,
not fully realized in her father’s novel, becomes manifested as Shelley’s Creature. Whereas
in St. Leon the horror moves from a rural to an urban environment, in Frankenstein the
occasions of horror are created in the city and left to fester in the rural space. In so doing,
Shelley’s novel makes manifest the Urban Gothic in respects that literary narratives of the
18th century had only alluded to.
40
CHAPTER 3
NATURE’S FAILURE AND THE CREATURE’S
TRIUMPH
In her preface to the 1818 edition of Frankenstein Shelley recounts, “The weather,
however, suddenly became serene; and my two friends left me on a journey among the Alps,
and lost, in the magnificent scenes which they present, all memory of their ghostly visions.
The following tale is the only one which has been completed” (4). For Mary Shelley’s fellow
travelers on the lake in the summer of 1816—Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Doctor John
William Polidori—the beauty of the natural space overwhelms supernatural terrors.
Frankenstein is the only “ghost” story to be finished, implying that Mary Shelley’s terrors
could not be overcome by Romantic rural retreat and sublime beauty. The Alps, which purge
Shelley’s companions of their ghostly visions, offer no such repose for Shelley herself. Her
horrors transcend the transformative qualities of the natural space, an implicit and perhaps
unintentional critique of the Romantic aesthetic, and a theme endemic to her novel. But when
Shelley subtitled Frankenstein “The Modern Prometheus,” she, as Anne Mellor has argued,
“forcefully directed our attention to the book’s critique both of the Promethean poets she
knew best, Byron and Percy Shelley, and of the entire Romantic ideology as she understood
it” (70). This final chapter is devoted to Shelley’s critique of the Romantic ideals implicit in
her representations of Nature and domesticity, assessing the ways Frankenstein portrays the
failure of Nature to either contain the menace of the creature or “humanize his soul.”36
Shelley’s novel certainly appears, in conformity with established Romantic fears of urban
encroachment, to cast Nature as a site of potential refuge from the menace emanating from
the city; but rather than finding solace in Nature, both Victor and the Creature are ruined,
rendering the immortal ambitions of the scientist—and Romantic poet—unattainable.
36
From Wordsworth’s Elegiac Stanzas, 36.
41
As I have explored in the proceeding chapters, the earliest Gothic texts explored rural
landscapes as sites that communicated aesthetic horror; aging castles, decaying abbeys, and
ancient manor houses were the dominant aesthetic images throughout the genre. The
corruption of the weakening aristocracy, represented by the haunted castle in Otranto, or the
sexually degenerate monk, symbolized by Lewis’s rural abbey, are both contained within the
boundaries of their respective ideological spaces. This changed in the years between The
Monk (1796) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Where Gothic specters and horrors
had generally been produced–and ultimately contained by–rural venues, Shelley’s monster
transgresses natural boundaries, escaping the confines of the city to spread his malevolence
into the Genevan countryside; the terror that he embodies cannot be contained by the majesty
of the Alps, or the wilderness of the Arctic. Shelley reveals her interest in nature and the
urban space early in the novel. Victor Frankenstein advises Walton, “[L]isten to my tale. I
believe that the strange incidents connected with it will afford a view of nature, which may
enlarge your faculties and understanding. You will hear of powers and occurrences, such as
you have been accustomed to believe impossible” (17). Frankenstein’s remarks here are
notable because he aims to enlarge Walton’s view of “nature,” which is distinct from the
domestic virtues, spiritual elements, and supernatural forces that are generally agreed to be at
the heart of Frankenstein; Victor claims that his story will expand Walton’s view of Nature
itself. 37 Though it is arguable that this reference is connected to the galvanization and
reanimation associated with the creation of the monster, I propose that Shelley’s wording
points to another of the story’s central preoccupations, the natural and the unnatural.
The reader is first introduced to this dichotomy when Victor pleads with Walton,
“Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the
acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier is a man who believes his native town to
be the world” (486). The idyllic scenes of Victor’s childhood home are juxtaposed with the
evils of the city, which becomes a symbol of ill-gotten knowledge and urban contamination.
37
See, for instance Hogle, Mellor, Halberstam, and Fred Botting’s Making Monstrous: Frankenstein,
Criticism, Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991.)
42
The Frankenstein home in Geneva is described as being on the eastern shore of a lake, “more
than a league from the city” (476). Shelley takes care to clearly distinguish the domestic,
rural space from the city, which is the source of Victor’s schooling and birthplace of the
Creature. In his account to Walton, Victor notes that, “the evil influence, the Angel of
Destruction, which asserted omnipotent sway over me from the moment I turned my reluctant
steps from my father’s door—led me first to M. Krempe, professor of natural philosophy”
(482, my emphasis). It is at the moment that the young aspiring academic leaves the rural
space—one associated with domestic and moral virtue—and enters into the university city of
Ingolstadt, that the “evil influence” asserts its hold. The journey from the rural, domestic
space to the city marks the beginning of Victor’s excessive ambitions, what Levy has
observed as Shelley’s “viewing discovery as a threat to the domestic affections” (698). Victor
reflects that M.Waldon’s lecture on modern chemistry is one he could “never forget” (30),
one that he ultimately reveals “decided my future destiny” (32). The professor is quoted as
saying, “[T]hese philosophers…have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the
recesses of nature, and shew how she works in her hiding places…They have acquired new
and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the
earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows” (30-31). Shelley
constructs Victor, like Godwin’s St. Leon, as a seeker of unnatural powers and knowledge of
the Natural world. Notably, Victor’s reflections additionally evoke Wordsworth’s thoughts
on his journey through the Alps, “But Nature then was Sovereign in my mind,/ And mighty
Forms, seizing a youthful fancy,/ Had given a charter to irregular hopes.” (6.334-336).38 In
effect, Victor’s aspirations to master Nature are reminiscent of what Levine has described as
“[t]he aspiration to divine creativity (akin to Romantic notions of the poet),” which, he
continues, “places Victor Frankenstein in the tradition of Faustian overreachers. Frankenstein
the creator is also Frankenstein the modern Prometheus, full of the great Romantic dream”
(9). Implicit in Shelley’s critique of nature is also a critique of the ideology in Romantic
writing, particularly Godwin’s.
38
From The Prelude
43
Shelley reinforces the novel’s interest in the urban space as a site of corruption upon
Frankenstein’s foray into the city. Once within Ingolstadt, Frankenstein, though aware of the
seasonal changes, becomes “insensible to the charms of nature” (488), forgoing the natural
world for the unnatural world, his workshop. This is a clear departure from the Romantic
ideal Nature—particularly in Wordsworth—that is associated with serenity and immunity
from menaces. The threats associated with Victor’s surroundings and unnatural activities
cannot be overcome by exposure to sublime landscapes. Victor’s separation from the
rhythms of nature is central to the stirring his own unnatural desires, which become
manifested in his unnatural creation. Though Shelley does not immediately identify the
source of the evil, its frequent contrast to Nature suggests that it is the contagious city that
poses the greatest threat. Shelley metaphorically juxtaposes the Natural, domestic space with
the unnatural, urban space. 39 This dichotomy is furthered when Frankenstein leaves the city.
Once returned to Nature, both his health and spirits are improved: “My health and spirits had
long been restored, and they gain additional strength from the salubrious air I
breathed…When happy, inanimate nature had the power of bestowing on me the most
delightful sensations. A serene sky and verdant fields filled me with ecstasy” (50-51). The
following pages describe Mont Blanc and the lake in great detail, focusing on Victor’s
Romantic transport and renewed vitality. But the placid scene is soon disturbed by a violent
storm, which precipitates the coming of the Creature, and reinforces the novel’s
preoccupation with Nature’s failure to endow moral reconciliation: “A flash of lightening
illuminated the object, and discovered its shape plainly to me; its gigantic stature, the
deformity of its aspect…the filthy daemon to whom I had given life” (56). The Creature is
both figuratively and literally responsible for the disruption of the environment’s natural
beauty. The novel’s setting is made even more remarkable when considered in light of Mary
Shelley’s happy association with the Alps, and their part in her life’s most felicitous domestic
periods.40 Rather than negate the Creature’s anger and destructive urges—as Shelley’s
39
The contrast between city and country was a popular topic of Romantic poets. Wordsworth’s “Upon
Westminster Bridge,” for instance, describes a city that has been naturalized by its comparative silence: “This
City now doth, like a garment, wear/The beauty of morning; silent, bare” (296).
40
The Alps was frequently (and happily) mentioned in the Shelley’s Six Weeks Tour and Wollstonecraft’s
Letters written during a short residence. Reflecting on a poem Percy write about Mont Blanc, Mary notes that it
44
literary and personal influences would be inclined to advance—the Alps serves to strengthen
the Creature’s power by indicating his mastery over the most tremendous of Natural
wonders.
Frankenstein thus explores the terrifying potential of a horror that cannot be
suppressed by Romantic aesthetics or domestic ideals. These were often closely associated in
Romantic poetry, as illustrated by Wordsworth in The Prelude as the combined regenerative
influence of sister Dorothy —“She in the midst of all preserved me still” (11.345)—and the
presence of “Nature’s self” (349). Not surprisingly, Nature and domestic felicity are
intimately connected throughout the novel, and neither is found to be supportive of
ideological and moral enlightenment.41 Though a comprehensive exploration of what Levine
has called “the defects of domesticity” in Frankenstein is beyond the scope of this study, it is
important to note that to the end Shelley investigates the failure of Nature to inspire
tranquility and overcome menace, she jointly indicts the inability if domesticity and
community to rehabilitate and reform.42 The 1818 preface claims that the novel’s “chief
concern” is “the exhibition of the amiableness of domestic affection, and the excellence of
universal virtue” (4). Told entirely through the accounts of Walton, Victor, and the Creature,
the three concentric narratives, as Kate Ellis convincingly argues, “are thematically linked
through the joint predicament of those who have and those who have not the highly desirable
experience of domestic affection. The recurrence of this theme suggests that Mary Shelley
was at least as much concerned with the limitations of that affection as she was with
demonstrating its amiableness” (123). Unlike Shelley’s confliction regarding domestic
was “composed under the immediate impression of the deep and powerful feelings excited by the objects which
it attempts to describe” (vi).
41
Mellor has observed a similar dynamic between domestic felicity and nature noting that, “Clerval’s
relationship with nature represents one dimension of the moral and political ideology espoused in the
novel…His death annihilates the possibility that Victor Frankenstein might regain a positive relationship with
nature” (124).
42
Knoepflmacher has suggested that Victor’s dream is “an intrapsychic conflict that had its roots in Mary
Shelley’s deprivation of a maternal model” (109), while Mellor has noted that in Frankenstein Shelley
“undercuts her earlier ideology of the loving, egalitarian family. Maternal love is strikingly associated with selfdestruction,” and, nodding to the differences in the 1831 edition, she concludes that “By 1831, Mary Shelley
had lost faith in the possibility that a generous, loving, and nurturant response to both human and physical
nature might create a world without monsters” (176).
45
affections, however, the inability of Nature to restrain excessive desires and menaces is not,
in the course of the novel, redeemed by Nature’s transformative abilities.
Following the winter spent watching the De Laceys, the Creature recalls being
cheered by the coming of spring: “Happy, happy earth! fit habitation for gods, which, so
short time before, was bleak…My spirits were elevated by the enchanting appearance of
nature; the past was blotted from my memory, the present was tranquil, and the future gilded
by bright rays of hope” (92). Shelley’s language embodies the Romantic aesthetic. Nature
bestows the Creature with Romantic elevation of mind, imparting tranquility in lieu of past
ills against him (as Coleridge imagined of Lamb). The return of spring, a metaphor for
renewal, also marks the homecoming of Safie, whose arrival resulted in “joy [taking] place of
sadness in the countenance of my friends” (94). The union of the family, marked by Nature’s
bounty, impresses upon the Creature a desire to join the domestic sphere—the idealized
family, complete with loving, maternal figures. Having learned of the De Laceys’ history,
the Creature recalls “I looked upon crime as a distant evil; benevolence and generosity were
ever present before me, inciting within me a desire to become an actor in the busy scene”
(102). The Creature is temporarily rehabilitated by his exposure to Natural beauty and
domestic affection. But rather than accept the Creature into their midst reformed by
Romantic ideals, he is banished from the domestic circle and the possibility of domestic
felicity. The spirit of Nature, failing to cement domestic affections and overcome material
differences, is rendered impotent and ephemeral. At his rejection the Creature relates,
“despair had not yet taken possession of me; my feelings were those of rage and revenge”
(110). As Levine notes, “The monster instinctively believes in the rhetoric of domesticity and
the need for community; it is psychologically and dramatically appropriate that he should
exhaust himself in the total destruction of ostensibly ideal domesticity when he discovers that
he is excluded from it, and that the ideal is false” (14). Facing his second rejection (the first
was Victor’s) proves to be a turning point in the novel. As Marilyn Butler has pointed out,
following his confrontation with the De Laceys, the Creature “becomes masculine,
combative, masterful, the emanation of the selfish ambitious side of his creator Frankenstein”
(Shelley xxxiv). Banished from the De Lacey family, representative of the domestic ideal,
and unable to find solace in Nature, the Creature embarks on his murderous rampage and
subsequent journey to find Victor in Geneva. His narrative: “From you only could I hope for
46
succor, although towards you I felt no sentiment but that of hatred…from you I determined to
seek that justice which I vainly attempted to gain from any other being that wore the human
form” (114), reveals the extent of his moral deterioration, having neither family nor sublime
revelations to draw consolation from.
Nature’s failure to overcome the menace and elevate the mind is reinforced in the
Creature’s inability to find moral reconciliation in the rural space. Shelley’s insistence on this
dynamic becomes almost comical as the novel progresses. The Creature relates that during
his journey to Frankenstein’s home “natured decay around [him]” (114) and at the moment
he feels “emotions of gentleness and pleasure,” cheered by the “loveliness of [the] sunshine
and balminess of the air” (115), he is shot saving a drowning girl. Nature’s inability to
contain and absolve the Creature directly leads him to commit his first murder. Having killed
William, the Creature frames the innocent Justine, who is tried and hanged as a murderess.
Victor himself notes that this was “the work of my thrice –accursed hands!” (512), a result of
his having forsaking his family in pursuit of selfish ambitions. The infection of death,
unimpeded by sublime reflection and pastoral retreats, eventually spreads to Victor’s father,
Clerval, Elizabeth, and ultimately himself, in addition to the ruin of the idyllic Swiss retreat
established by the De Lacey family after their initial encounter with the Creature. As an
additional dimension to Shelley’s interest in the shortcomings of the Romantic aesthetic was
her attention to Nature’s relationship to domestic felicity.
In Elizabeth’s letter to Victor, Shelley reconnects the Romantic preoccupation with
Nature and the domestic, creating a foundation for her critique. “The blue lake, and snowclad mountains,” Elizabeth writes, “never change;--and I think our placid home, and our
contented hearts are regulated by the same immutable laws” (495).43 The Frankenstein home
is intimately tied both in Victor’s mind and the novel’s plot with pastoral scenery that evokes
moral virtue and domestic serenity. Nature is a site that promotes domestic felicity, the same
placidity that is alluded to in the imagery of the lake and mountains. But rather than maintain
and preserve the possibility of an ideal family, Nature fails to “regulate” the “contented
hearts” of Victor and the Creature. Critics, however, have largely associated Shelley’s
43
This is notably from the 1831 edition.
47
pastoral images with domestic affection and virtue. As Mellor has noted, “Mary Shelley’s
grounding of moral virtue in the preservation of familial bonds…entails an aesthetic credo as
well…Her novel purposefully identifies moral virtue, based on moderation, self-sacrifice,
and domestic affection, with aesthetic beauty” (126). As previously noted, a key dynamic in
Frankenstein is Shelley’s critique of the Romantic aesthetic. Victor’s inability to find
spiritual reconciliation in “the charms of nature” is central to the novel’s overarching
criticism of moral irresponsibility and excessive ambition. The laws of Nature, understood in
the context of Elizabeth’s letter as pertaining to both the natural environment and human
nature (chiefly that of female procreation and heterosexual companionship), are threatened
by urban excess, at the heart of which is the possibility of immortality.44 45 Romantic
ideology pertaining to Nature’s power is found to be deficient, and in the case of Victor
Frankenstein, dangerously so. Victor’s decision to seek solace in the mountains of
Switzerland rather than take responsibility for the Creature and his family yields none of the
Romantic rewards in the tradition of Wordsworth or Keats. 46 Victor recounts,
The sea, or rather the vast river of ice, wound the vast river of ice, wound among its
dependent mountains…My heart, which was before sorrowful, now swelled with
something like joy; I exclaimed—‘Wondering spirits…allow me this faint happiness.’
As I said this, I suddenly beheld the figure of a man…I perceived, as the shape came
nearer…that it was the wretch whom I had created (76).
As previously noted, the Creature’s appearance signals Victor’s inability to find solace in
Nature. Despite Victor’s efforts to restore himself with solitary reflection in the sublime
landscape, his mental deterioration worsens; and rather than parent the creature, or take his
place within the Frankenstein household, Victor seeks revenge.
By the novel’s conclusion, all of its primary characters, with the exception of Walton
(who must live to tell the tale) meet fatal ends, made significant by their relationship to
Victor and his monster. Victor, a character whose journey arguably recalls that of Reginald
44
Heterosexual companionship is in Frankenstein superseded by homosocial relationships, such those of
Walton and Victor, and Victor and Clerval.
45
46
This, as Godwin demonstrates in St. Leon, results in, among other things, the destruction of the family.
In Book 1 of Endymion, for instance, Keats writes, “Nor do we merely feel these [natural] essences/ For
one short hour…The passion poesy, glories infinite,/Haunt us till they become a cheering light” (1.25-30).
48
St. Leon, Caleb Williams, and Caliph Vathek, is distinguished from his predecessors by his
physical and metaphysical deterioration as a result of urban exposure—or perhaps, urban
cultivation—which is physically manifested in the Creature. Like St. Leon (a novel that, as
Butler has noted, “anticipates Frankenstein’s themes of science and gender”) Frankenstein’s
prolonged separation from his family while in the city leads to the deterioration of domestic
ties.47 But what is for Godwin ultimately reconcilable—as evidenced in the happy marriage
of St. Leon’s son and his own bitter regret—is entirely irreconcilable in Frankenstein. At the
end of Godwin’s narrative, St. Leon reflects on the calamities following his time at the
gambling tables in Paris and the tragedies that followed noting, “I am happy to close my
eventful and melancholy story with so pleasing a termination. Whatever may have been the
result of my personal experience of human life, I can never recollect the fate of Charles and
Pandora without confessing exultation” (478). Despite having succumbed to the temptations
of the city and forsaking his family to pursue unnatural knowledge, St. Leon finds a measure
of happiness in the virtues of his son. The story closes by reminding the reader that the world
“yet contains something in its stores that is worth living for” (478), suggesting that the selfinterested quest for powers over nature—the opus magnum (1) of scientific pursuits—is
potentially injurious but not entirely destructive. In response, Shelley’s novel reimagines St.
Leon’s discovery of the philosophers’ stone as Frankenstein’s ability of reanimatation. For
Shelley, the city induces unnatural, monstrous birth, characterized by the absence of the
natural, maternal figure and Victor’s separation from the normalizing, domestic space.48 As
Ellis points out, “Walton and Frankenstein, are both benevolent men whose exile from the
domestic hearth drives them deeper and deeper into isolation. Neither, however, can see that
his deprivation might have been avoided through a better understanding of the limits of the
institution into which he was born” (125). Victor’s negligence of the creature, a hyperbolic
reconsideration of St. Leon’s neglect of his son, Charles, results in the total destruction of the
Frankenstein family and the death of Victor himself. Shelley fully realizes the threat of urban
contamination and moral decay hinted at in St. Leon by refusing to restrain the creature’s
malevolent reach. The Creature, speaking to Walton and his deceased maker at the novel’s
47
From the introduction of the 1818 edition.
48
See Gilbert and Gubar.
49
conclusion bids, “Farewell, Frankenstein! If thou wert yet alive, and yet cherished a desire of
revenge against me, it would be better satiated in my life than in my destruction…Blasted as
thou wert, my agony was still superior to thine” (191), and is subsequently “borne away by
the waves”, presumed to have left to destroy himself. The novel’s finale, unlike that of
previous gothic novels, is characterized by its troubling climax; Victor himself learns nothing
from his experience, requesting from his deathbed that Walton pursue the creature in his
stead. The creature, though grieved for his part in Victor’s death, reminds the corpse that his
own agonies were greater, and flees to find death on his own terms. Unlike Victor, who dies
from exposure to the elements and exhaustion, Frankenstein’s monster plans to “ascend [his]
funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames” (191). This hero’s
death, one not afforded Victor, interestingly points to a subversion of the traditional Gothic
conclusion in which the monstrous threat is eradicated and conventional social values are
upheld (ie. Heterosexual marriage, class divisions, Protestantism etc.) That neither Walton
nor the reader is certain of the creature’s demise creates another ambiguity concerning the
containment of the monstrosity unleashed by Frankenstein’s ambition and negligence. The
open-ended conclusion (does the Creature really find wood for his funeral pyre?) further
destabilizes the tidy Gothic novels of Radcliffe and even Godwin.
This is a departure from the urban terrors developed in The Monk; the horrors of
Frankenstein cannot be contained in the city, and ultimately, cannot be overcome even by the
Gothic horror associated with nature. Indeed, the terrors of urbanity and technology
associated with the industrial age are inescapable. Frankenstein’s monster traverses the
farthest reaches of the natural world, overcoming the most violent and perilous environments.
Frankenstein reflects, “the strange nature of the animal would elude all pursuit…Besides, of
what use would be pursuit? Who could arrest a creature capable of scaling the overhanging
sides of Mount Salêve? (57). Shelley sets up the creature as both immune to human assault
and the destructive potential of the natural world. She takes great care to introduce and
develop the threat of natural destruction and human frailty throughout the novel. Reflecting
on his first encounter with electricity Frankenstein notes, “we witnessed the most violent and
terrible thunder-storm. It advanced from behind the mountains of Jura; and the thunder burst
at once with frightful loudness...I remained, while the storm lasted, watching its progress
with curiosity and delight.” He continues, going on to describe the remains of an oak tree
50
blasted by lightening, “we found the tree shattered in a singular manner. It was not splintered
by the shock, but entirely reduced to thin ribbons of wood. I never beheld any thing so utterly
destroyed” (24). The novel’s interest in Nature’s destructive powers is revisited in its climax.
As Walton’s ship is threatened by treacherous seas he writes, “I am surrounded by mountains
of ice, which admit of no escape, and threaten every moment to crush my vessel” (181).
Shelley’s careful grooming of Frankenstein’s references to nature I think illustrates, as
previously suggested, the Creature’s indestructibility and his mastery over the natural world.
Even nature’s harshest environments present no threat to the monster, which speaks to the
rural space’s symbolic vulnerability to urban encroachment and industrial development.
These concerns became more apparent in the 1831 edition of Frankenstein,
demonstrating that Shelley was greatly influenced by historical anxieties with the shifting
demographics of the mid 19th century. In the 13 years between editions of the text, the
sanitary conditions of London had taken a dramatic turn. Though the plague didn’t return in
the 18th century, there was no lack of pestilence in London’s crowded streets. Vermin and
filth were a common sight in the city, and few provisions had been made for the disposal of
sewage. As Michelle Allen has observed in her book Cleansing the City (2008), one of the
consequences of London’s rapid growth was an extraordinary volume of human waste being
dumped onto the streets, overflowing the sewers, and running into the Thames. And as Allen
suggests, this high concentration of waste was “impressed [on] urban consciousness” (9).
Diseases such as cholera and typhus were commonly contracted, and, in the 19th century,
reached epidemic proportions. For the urban pedestrian, walking in the city was most
certainly a source of anxiety, if not eminently dangerous to one’s health and wellbeing. This
concern extended well into midcentury. The profusion of urban assaults upon the body came
to a head in the 1850’s. The Great Stink of London occurred in the summer of 1858. The
Metropolitan Commission had moved the city’s waste from the cesspools of London into the
sewers, which ran directly into the river Thames. The noxious stink of that summer cannot be
overstated, nor the reimagination of the Thames in the social consciousness. The sanitary
crisis of the middle of the century prompted social reforms. But as Allen points out, the
anxieties concerning urban living extended past the proliferation of filth and disease. “Health
was really the most humble claim of sanitary reformers; at their most ambitious, reformers
promised to uplift a suffering urban underclass, to moralize the population, and thus to herald
51
in a harmonious social order” (2). Contemporary critics of the current social reforms, such as
John Hollingshead, discussed the reality and perception of the city in an attempt to “beat the
bounds of metropolitan dirt and misery” (v). Such accounts provide a historical perspective
from which to understand the direction of the textual changes in the 1831 edition of Shelley’s
novel. Notably, Frankenstein’s concern with the Romantic aesthetic is emphasized. Pastoral
images are more closely tied to Romantic ideology, and to the character of Elizabeth. In
chapter two Shelley adds the additional thoughts, “[Elizabeth] busied herself with following
the aerial creations of the poets; and the majestic and wondrous scenes with surrounded our
Swiss home—the sublime shapes of the mountains…[while] I delighted in investigating their
causes” (476). Elizabeth, symbolic of domestic affection and poetic virtue, is unable to
restore Victor to physical and ideological rights. This is furthered in the addition to
Elizabeth’s letter to Victor in Chapter V (VI) in which she writes, “The blue lake, and snowclad mountains, they never change;--and I think our placid home, and our contented hearts
are regulated by the same immutable laws” (495). Despite Victor’s return to his father’s
home upon William’s death, the lake and mountains, fashioned to be more evocative of the
Romantic aesthetic, are unable to regulate his heart according to the “immutable laws” of
Nature. Shelley also takes care to reinforce Nature’s destructive potential noting of Victor’s
journey to Chamounix, “The immense mountains and precipices that overhung me on every
side…spoke of a power mighty as omnipotence,” adding substantial imagery to the
following chapter, including, “Nature was broken only by the brawling waves, or fall of
some vast fragment…which, through the silent working of immutable laws, was ever and
anon rent and torn, as if it had been but a plaything in their hands” (516-517). These
additions were arguably influenced by the untimely death of Percy Shelley in 1822 who
drowned at sea after a violent storm. But significantly, Mary Shelley retains the descriptions
of the Creature’s inhuman invulnerability to Nature, reinforcing the metaphoric threat that he
presents to the Romantic Aesthetic.
52
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