''Frankenstein'' authorship question

Percy Bysshe Shelley's 1816 poem "Mutability" in a draft of Frankenstein with his changes to the text in his handwriting. Bodleian. Oxford.

The Frankenstein authorship question is a debate over the role and the extent of Percy Bysshe Shelley's contributions in the writing of the novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, published anonymously in London in 1818. Handwriting analyses have shown that some portions of the original manuscript were written in his handwriting. Arguments on the subject range from arguments that he acted strictly as an editor/reviewer (with actual authorship remaining with Mary Shelley) to claims that he was the sole author.

Background

The dispute over authorship began as soon as the novel was published anonymously on January 1, 1818 in London. There was much speculation and controversy over the actual author of the book. Percy Bysshe Shelley was suspected as the author but he denied any role whatsoever in the writing of the book. He claimed that he only supervised the manuscript during its publication.

The novel was first attributed to Percy Bysshe Shelley in a 1818 review by Walter Scott who recognized Shelley's style and ideas in the Preface and noticed Shelley's poem "Mutability" and poetry passages and citations in the book.^[1][2] Shelley acknowledged that he had been written the preface and poetry excerpts, but disclaimed authorship of the novel itself. Scott concluded that it was "an extraordinary tale, in which the author seems to us to disclose uncommon powers of poetic imagination".

The next public challenge to Mary Shelley’s authorship was in 1824 in a review of her follow-up novel in the British literary magazine Knight’s Quarterly Review, published and edited by Charles Knight. In the section “Frankenstein”, the reviewer wrote that the two books were by two different authors^[3]:

"[T]here is not the slightest trace of the same hand -- instead of the rapidity and enthusiastic energy which hurries you forward in Frankenstein, every thing is cold, crude, inconsecutive, and wearisome; -- not one flash of imagination, not one spark of passion -- opening it as I did, with eager expectation, it must indeed have been bad for me after toiling a week to send the book back without having finished the first volume. This induced me to read Frankenstein again -- for I thought I must have been strangely mistaken in my original judgment. So far, however, from this, a second reading has confirmed it. I think Frankenstein possesses extreme power, and displays capabilities such as I did hope would have produced far different things from Castruccio. ... But whence arises the extreme inferiority of Valperga? I can account for it only by supposing that Shelley wrote the first, though it was attributed to his wife, -- and that she really wrote the last. … It has much of his poetry and vigour … At all events, the difference of the two books is very remarkable."

An author for the novel was first given in an 1821 French translation published in Paris by Corréard as Frankenstein, ou le Prométhée moderne by Jules Saladin as by "M.me Shelly". An 1823 second edition published in London by G. and W. B. Whittaker supervised by Mary's father William Godwin listed the author as "Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley". Godwin made "114 substantive changes" to the 1818 edition but did not credit Percy Bysshe Shelley as the author of the Preface, did not cite him as the author of "Mutability", implying that Mary wrote them, left off the John Milton epigraph from Paradise Lost, and did not credit Shelley for his textual contributions to the work generally.^[4]

In the 1831 edition published by Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley in London, Mary admitted for the first time that Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote the Preface but denied that he made any textual contributions to the novel. This third edition was a heavily revised version of the 1818 original that significantly and substantially altered the novel.

The next major challenge came in 1974. The authorship issue was revived when drafts and proofs of the novel revealed that some sections were written in Percy Bysshe Shelley's handwriting. James Rieger, an English professor and editor, in a publication of the original 1818 edition in 1974, republished in 1982, argued that Shelley made significant contributions to the novel and should be regarded at least as a "minor collaborator" or even as a collaborator: "His assistance at every point in the book's manufacture was so extensive that one hardly knows whether to regard him as editor or minor collaborator. ... Percy Bysshe Shelley worked on Frankenstein at every stage, from the earliest drafts through the printer's proofs, with Mary's final 'carte blanche to make what alterations you please.' ... We know that he was more than an editor. Should we grant him the status of minor collaborator?"^[5] He claimed that Shelley was intricately and minutely involved in the composition of the novel from the outset.

In 1993 in Monstrous Imagination, Marie-Hélène Huet argued that Percy Bysshe Shelley was the novel’s co-author by documenting his undisputed contributions (e.g., the preface and poetry inserts).

In 2007, John Lauritsen's The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein was published in which he argued that Percy Bysshe Shelley was the author of the novel. He further maintained that the novel "has consistently been underrated and misinterpreted" and that its dominant theme is "male love".

English professor Charles E. Robinson placed Shelley's name on a 2008 edition of the book The Original Frankenstein which caused widespread media comment and discussion.^[6] In 2015, in The Neglected Shelley, Robinson examined Shelley's alleged significant contributions to the novel in greater detail.

Scott D. de Hart, a graduate of Oxford University with a PhD. in nineteenth century English Literature and legal disputes, published Shelley Unbound: Discovering Frankenstein's True Creator in 2013, supporting the thesis of Lauritsen that Shelley was the true author of the work.

These books build upon the earlier publications that argued that Percy Bysshe Shelley was the actual author of Frankenstein, such as Shelley's Fiction (1998) by Phyllis Zimmerman, in which she examined and compared the writing styles of Shelley and his wife, and Selwyn B. Jones' The Fraudulent Author of Frankenstein, a 2002 unpublished manuscript that examined the historical background of the events in the novel.

In The Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein (2016), Charles E. Robinson detailed Shelley's major contributions to the text: "It is noteworthy, however, that Percy Shelley undertook writing the last 12 3/4 pages of the Fair Copy and that he significantly altered the Draft text of Walton's description of Victor's and the monster's final words."

Arguments for Percy Bysshe Shelley’s authorship

Percy Bysshe Shelley's edits, additions, and emendations in a draft of Frankenstein in darker ink in his handwriting. Bodleian. Oxford.

Authors have examined and investigated Percy Bysshe Shelley’s scientific knowledge and experimentation, his two Gothic horror novels published in 1810 and 1811, his atheistic worldview, his antipathy to church and state, his 1818 Preface to Frankenstein, and his connection to the secret anti-Catholic organization, the Illuminati. These revelations showed that the novel was based on Shelley's life, background, his readings such as John Milton's Paradise Lost, Ruins of Empires (1791) by Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney, which also informed "Ozymandias", also published in 1818, Sir Humphry Davy's Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1812), a textbook which Percy Bysshe Shelley owned^[7], and the works of Dr. Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, whom Shelley had earlier cited as a major influence in Queen Mab (1813), his views on religion, his poetic style, and his themes and ideas. In letters to William Godwin, Shelley also mentioned his affinity for Paracelsus, Albertus Magnus, and Heinrich Agrippa, "some of the physiological writers of Germany" cited in his 1818 Preface to Frankenstein.^[8][9] The conclusion was that the novel has more to do with Shelley than to Mary, based on its science, its style, its imagery, its poetry, and its language.

These arguments have been disputed as being mere coincidences. Leslie S. Klinger, in The New Annotated Frankenstein (2017), argued it is spurious to maintain "that the biographical coincidences of Victor Frankenstein and Percy Shelley are evidence of Percy's authorship". Instead, critics rely on the handwriting evidence and Mary’s statements in the 1831 Introduction to the novel.^[10]

It is argued that Percy Bysshe Shelley did not want his authorship of Frankenstein to be known to the public, so he attributed authorship to Mary Shelley, who was 18 years old when the novel was begun. There are inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and outright contradictions in the 1818 Preface, written by Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the 1831 Preface written by Mary Shelley. This comparison and analysis shows that both Shelley and Mary conspired to maintain a "hoax" that she was the sole author of Frankenstein. But Mary's admission in 1831 that Shelley, in fact, wrote the 1818 Preface, usually written by the author of a novel, not her, and the subsequent examination of the original manuscripts and final drafts proved incontrovertibly that Shelley not only had a significant role in the writing of the novel from start to finish, but also that her earlier statements, and those by Shelley, were untrue and a deception or cover-up was revealed. The handwriting evidence alone proves that he wrote at a minimum approximately 10% of the novel. This fact is not disputed. This evidence demonstrated that a hoax had indeed been perpetrated because the original claims were that Percy Bysshe Shelley had absolutely no role in the writing of the novel.

Proponents of Shelly's authorship claim that Shelley was obsessed with electricity, galvanism, and the reanimation of corpses, and point to the influence of Dr. James Lind, Shelley's former teacher at Eton College. Advocates of Shelley's authorship also point out that novel contains Shelley's poetry such as "Mutability" as well as poetry by others, that the novel was imbued with the themes of atheism, social tolerance, social justice, reform, and antipathy to monarchism that only Shelley advocated, and that there were noticeable motifs and subjects in the novel which only he espoused, such as vegetarianism, pantheism, alchemy, incest, male friendship, and scientific discovery.

These authors compared the two early Shelley Gothic horror novels Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvyne (1811) with Frankenstein and found them to be precursors of the latter novel, containing the same or similar ideas, themes, structure, plot, and characters. Zastrozzi is a novel of pursuit and revenge where an atheist antagonist seeks to destroy his victim and his progeny. He can kill his victim at any time, but instead seeks to torture and slowly kill his victim by destroying and killing everything he loves. In St. Irvyne, the plot centers around an alchemist, Ginotti, who has a lifelong goal to find the secret of life by the study of "natural philosophy", to attain immortality. It is also a plot of pursuit where the alchemist seeks to impart the secret of eternal life to Wolfstein, the protagonist. There is even a poem in St. Irvyne on the reanimation of a corpse, the nun Rosa. Both novels rely extensively on John Milton's Paradise Lost, containing epigraphs like in Frankenstein, and contain poetry intertwined throughout the novel, a distinctive feature of Frankenstein as well. These novels were also published anonymously.

Moreover, Shelley's modus operandi was to publish his works anonymously. One reason was to avoid a blasphemous libel prosecution because of his radical ideas and pronouncements. Another reason was because Shelley was accustomed to perpetrating hoaxes and deceptions such as Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire (1810) and Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson (1810) and veiling his authorship.

Finally, Shelley authorship proponents claim that Shelley’s documented and undisputed contributions to the novel have been acknowledged by Sir Walter Scott, James Rieger, John Lauritsen, Scott D. de Hart, and Charles Robinson.

Critics of Shelley as author or contributor, however, dismiss this evidence outright. They maintain that Shelley merely acted as an “editor” of the novel, correcting his wife’s grammar and word choice.

The handwriting evidence has also been disputed because it is based on final drafts of the novel that do not accurately reveal its composition. Critics of Shelley as author point out that drafts of many of Shelley's works such as Prometheus Unbound, The Masque of Anarchy, The Witch of Atlas, Peter Bell the Third, "The Sensitive Plant", and the play The Cenci were written in Mary's handwriting but composed by Shelley.^[11] Such critics claim, therefore, that handwriting in itself is irrelevant in determining authorship.

References

Bibliography

• Adams, Stephen. "Percy Bysshe Shelley helped wife Mary write Frankenstein, claims professor: Mary Shelley received extensive help in writing Frankenstein from her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, a leading academic has claimed." Telegraph, 24 August 2008. Charles E. Robinson: "He made very significant changes in words, themes and style. The book should now be credited as 'by Mary Shelley with Percy Shelley'."
• Goulding, Christopher. (2002). "The real Doctor Frankenstein?" Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 95(5): 257-9. Christopher Goulding: "My thesis is that she [Mary Shelley] got what science she knew from Percy Shelley."
• de Hart, Scott D. Shelley Unbound: Discovering Frankenstein's True Creator. Foreword by Joseph P. Farrell. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2013.
• de Hart, Scott D. and Joseph P. Farrell. Transhumanism: A Grimoire of Alchemical Agendas. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2012.
• Grande, James. "The Original Frankenstein, By Mary Shelley with Percy Shelley ed Charles E Robinson. To what extent did Percy Bysshe Shelley work on 'Frankenstein'? A new analysis reveals all." 16 November, 2008, The Independent. Retrieved 30 September, 2018.
• Huet, Marie Hélène. Monstrous Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
• King-Hele Desmond. (1967). "Shelley and Dr Lind." Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin, 18: 1-6.
• Lauritsen, John. The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein. Dorchester, MA: Pagan Press, 2007.
• Lauritsen, John. (Spring 2007). "Debunking the Mary Shelley Legend." Gay & Lesbian Humanist.
• Lauritsen, John. (June, 2018). "The Real Frankenstein and Its Author", Mensa Bulletin: The Magazine of American Mensa, 24-25.
• Murray, E.B. (1978). "Shelley's Contribution to Mary's Frankenstein," Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin, 29, 50-68.
• Murray-Fennell, Michael. "Did Mary Shelley really write Frankenstein?", Country Life, May 7, 2017.
• Owchar, Nick. "The Siren's Call: An epic poet as Mary Shelley's co-author. A new edition of 'Frankenstein' shows the contributions of her husband, Percy." Los Angeles Times, 11 October 2009.
• Paglia, Camille (March 14, 2007). "Mary Shelley debunked." Salon. Retrieved 20 April 2018.
• Rhodes, Jerry. "New paperback by UD professor offers two versions of Frankenstein tale." UDaily, University of Delaware, 30 September 2009. Charles E. Robinson: "These italics used for Percy Shelley's words make even more visible the half-dozen or so places where, in his own voice, he made substantial additions to the 'draft' of Frankenstein."
• Rieger, James. Edited, with variant readings, an Introduction, and, Notes by. Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
• Rieger, James. "Dr. Polidori and the Genesis of Frankenstein." Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 3 (Winter 1963), 461-72.
• Robinson, Charles E., ed. The Original Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (with Percy Bysshe Shelley). New York: Vintage Books, 2008.
• Robinson, Charles E. "Percy Bysshe Shelley's Text(s) in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein", in The Neglected Shelley edited by Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb. London and New York: Routledge, 2015, pp. 117-136.
• Robinson, Charles E. "Frankenstein: Its Composition and Publication" in The Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein edited by Andrew Smith. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016, p. 16.
• Rosner, Victoria. "Co-Creating a Monster." The Huffington Post, 29 September 2009. "Random House recently published a new edition of the novel Frankenstein with a surprising change: Mary Shelley is no longer identified as the novel's sole author. Instead, the cover reads 'Mary Shelley (with Percy Shelley).'"
• "Scot's monster role played up". BBC News, May 1, 2002. "[Mary] Shelley: Knew little of science". Christopher Goulding: "[W]e might now give some credit to the time spent six years previously by her husband-to-be in the study of a retired Scots physician in Windsor."
• Shelley, Mary, with Percy Shelley. The Original Frankenstein. Edited and with an Introduction by Charles E. Robinson. Oxford: The Bodleian Library, 2008. ISBN 978-1-85124-396-9
• Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "Reviews: On 'Frankenstein'." The Athenaeum, London, Sunday, November 10, 1832., No. 263, page 730.
• Wade, Phillip. "Shelley and the Miltonic Element in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein." Milton and the Romantics, 2 (December 1976), 23-25. A scene from Zastrozzi is re-invoked in Frankenstein.
• Zimmerman, Phyllis. Shelley's Fiction. Los Angeles, CA: Darami Press, 1998.