Collected Essays. Brian Aldiss
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of the continued appeal of the novel is the drama of a neglected child.
Upon this structure of one kind of reality, Mary built a further structure, one of the intellect. A fever for knowledge abounds; not only Frankenstein but the monster and Walton also, and the judicial processes throughout the book, are in a quest for knowledge of one kind and another. Interestingly, the novel contains few female characters (a departure from the Gothic mode with its soft, frightened heroines). Victor’s espoused, Elizabeth, remains always a distant figure. The monster, a product of guilty knowledge, threatens the world with evil progeny.
The monster is, of course, more interesting than Victor. He has the vitality of evil, like Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost before him and Quilp in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop after him, eloquent villains both. It is the monster that comes first to our minds, as it was the monster that came first to Mary Shelley’s mind. The monster holds its appeal because it was created by science, or at least pseudoscience, rather than by any pacts with the devil, or by magic, like the Golem.
The point about discussing where science fiction begins is that it helps our understanding of the nature and function of SF. In France in pre-Revolution days, for instance, several books appeared with Enlightenment scenarios depicting a future where present trends were greatly developed, and where the whole world became a civilized extension of the Tuilleries. The best-known example is Sebastien Mercier’s L ‘An 2440, set seven centuries ahead in time. The book was translated into several foreign languages.
Mercier writes in the utopian tradition; Mary Shelley does not. Here we see a division of function. Jules Verne was influenced by Mercier, and worked with ‘actual possibilities of invention and discovery’. H. G. Wells was influenced by Frankenstein, and wrote what he called fantasies—the phrase set in quotes is Wells’s, who added that he ‘did not pretend to deal with possible things.’ One can imagine Mary Shelley saying as much. With her, the impossible inner life found tongue.
As Muriel Spark says, Mary in her thinking seems at least fifty years ahead of her time.[6] She captured the Irrational, one of the delights and torments of our age. By dressing it in rational garb and letting it stalk the land, she unwittingly dealt a blow against the tradition to which Mercier was heir. Utopia is no place for irrationality.
Other arguments for the seminal qualities of Frankenstein are set out more fully in Trillion Year Spree. In sum, Victor Frankenstein is a modernist, consciously rejecting ancient fustian booklore in favour of modern science, kicking out father figures. His creation of life shows him further usurping maternal power, invading what was previously God’s province—the role medicine has played since Jenner’s smallpox vaccine. Victor and his monster together function as the light and dark side of mankind, in a symbolism to become increasingly comprehensible after Mary Shelley’s death.
As befitted an author writing after the Napoleonic Wars, when the Industrial Revolution was well under way, Mary Shelley deals, not merely with extrapolated development like Mercier before her, but with unexpected change—like Wells after her. Above all, Frankenstein stands as the figure of the scientist (though the word was not coined when Mary wrote), set apart from the rest of society, unable to control new forces he has brought into the world. The successor to Prometheus is Pandora. Excepting H. G. Wells, no other writer presents us with as many innovations as Mary Shelley.
In the year 1818, when Frankenstein was first published, news reached England of a terrible epidemic which had broken out in India. The inhabitants of the district concerned died or fled. The disease moved from Calcutta, its traditional capital, to march on Delhi and Bombay. It advanced beyond the confines of the subcontinent, and in 1821 crossed the Arabian Sea to cause such havoc that the bodies of the dead were too many to bury. It moved towards Tehran and Basra, and up the Tigris to Baghdad.
By 1822 it had spread by caravan to Southern Russia. Meanwhile, it engulfed Burma, Siam, and the Philippines. It entered the portals of the vast hunting grounds of China. Its name was Cholera.
After a lull came a second pandemic. The scourge appeared in Moscow. It moved along the Danube, infecting a quarter of a million people in Hungary alone within a three month period. Cracow fell to the invader, as did Warsaw and Riga.
As it travelled along the Baltic, it was still making its visitation in the Middle East. In Cairo and Alexandria 30,000 people died in a day. By 1831 cholera raged all over Europe. In the exceptional summer of that year, the disease crossed the North Sea to cause the famous Sunderland outbreak; from Sunderland it spread to London and elsewhere.
Plagues, epidemics of various kinds, have been a source of superstitious and religious fear through the centuries. Plague is the hero of The Last Man. Mary Shelley’s novel, when published in 1826, was topical, and scarcely more sensational than the facts.
Yet the Hogarth Press edition in 1985 was the first reprint in England of this important novel. Almost no-one had read it; histories of literature fail to mention it. After a slow beginning, it has all the magic of a tumbled landscape by J. M. W. Turner—a painter whom Mary Shelley admired, who died the year she did. Why such astounding neglect?
Indifference may be ascribed in part to male chauvinism, in part to the snobbishness of critics. Other factors working against her have been Mary Shelley’s own self-effacing character, and the eclipsing fame of those surrounding her.
The tangle of relationships following William Godwin’s second marriage forms a marked part of the first volume of The Last Man. Mary acquired a step-mother, step-brother and step-sister, and in due course a half-brother. Her confusion of mind was not helped by Godwin’s neglect (‘He never caressed me …’). Godwin became preoccupied with the publishing firm which he and his new wife, a good businesswoman, were establishing. When Mary was ten, the ménage moved into Skinner Street, to live above the publishing shop. Skinner Street was close to Smithfield Market and Newgate Prison, an area then notorious for a variety of iniquity; the ominously named street had been so christened by reason of its relationship with the nearby market.
Mary Shelley had her escapes from Skinner Street—to a school in Ramsgate, to a friend of her father’s near Dundee (then a seven-day sea voyage away). She remembered Scotland with affection; its wildness is recaptured in the early pages of The Last Man; but she would have felt too the chill of isolation which, experienced unrelievedly in childhood, frequently persists in adult life.
The landscapes of Scotland and Switzerland are put to good use in The Last Man: landscapes of chaos and grandeur. Mary’s language, though it is the high-flown prose of Romantic sensibility, carries with it a modern apprehension that nature offers no refuge, being somehow implicated in disaster.
‘Old towns are always dirty’, said Claire Clairmont, dismissively cheerful. Mary Shelley and Claire had grown up in a time of war and destruction; for them, catastrophe formed part of the natural order. All of Mary Shelley’s novels are to a large extent autobiographical; although The Last Man is a symbolist drama, its drama reflects suffering seen or endured. In many of its aspects, The Last Man is a transposition of reality, rather than pure fantasy.
During the eight years Mary and Shelley spent together, they were generally short of money, on the move and hungry. She was generally pregnant. But even the equable period of their relationship seemed to have fate against it. 1816 was known as ‘the year without a summer’. Following the eruption of the volcano Tamboro in the East Indies, dust penetrated the stratosphere and deflected sunlight from the Earth. All over Europe, grain harvests and vintages were late. Rainfall was heavy. Weather anomalies were blamed for the typhus epidemics and that great cholera outbreak of 1818. The decade from 1810 to 1819—the decade in which Thackeray and Dickens were born—was the coldest in England since the 1690s. The phenomena in The Last Man appear less freakish when we recall the actual phenomena of Mary’s lifetime.
Among these manifestations are a wind (Chapter V) raging for four months without cease. It is the occasion for one of Mary’s finest apostrophes, written, no doubt, with Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind in mind. Less scientifically, a black sun rises in the west and eclipses the ‘parent of day’, to the understandable