End Notes
Dr Jekyll, frankenstein and Shelly's Heart
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[1] Genesis 2: 7; 21-22.
[2] Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, Penguin Books, London 1992 (Ed, Maurice Hindle).
[3] Maurice Hindle, Introduction to Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, Penguin Books, London 1992 (revised edn) Introduction at xx. The unseasonal weather in this so-called Year Without a Summer may have been influenced by the colossal and violent eruption of the volcano Mt Tambora, Indonesia, during the previous year. In one of the most powerful eruptions in recorded history, vast amounts of volcanic ash and gases were ejected into the atmosphere. Very likely as a result, there was a sustained cooling of temperatures around the world for many months: Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Tambora, the Eruption that Changed the World, Princeton University Press, 2015.
[4] Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder, Harper Press, London, 2008, at 327. As to “flirtatious – Claire was a former lover of Byron and was still smitten; Polidori made a play for an uninterested Mary.
[5] Andrew McConnell Stott, The Poet and the Vampyre: the Curse of Byron and the Birth of Literature’s Greatest Monsters, Pegasus, 2014.
[6] Mary Shelley, Preface to 1831 edition.
[7] Many of the issues in the story had been deep concerns of Shelley himself. He evidently made many suggestions, often substantial, in the drafting of the story, and was originally believed to be its author.
[8] These issues are thoroughly considered in Sharon Ruston, “The science of life and death in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein”, https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/the-science-of-life-and-death-in-mary-shelleys-frankenstein#sthash.7cuxk1wd.dpuf; and Sharon Ruston (2005) “Resurrecting Frankenstein”, The Keats-Shelley Review, 19:1, 97-116; http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1179/ksr.2005.19.1.97?needAccess=true
[9] Hindle, op cit at xiv – xvi.
[10] Ruston, op cit.
[11] Ruston, op cit
[12] Ruston, op cit.
[13] Mary Shelley’s Journal, cited in Hindle, op cit at xix; xxv. Associated with this, considerable interest was shown in the intermediate stages of suspended animation, such as comas, or even fainting or sleeping. In Frankenstein, Mary describes various incidents of fainting or collapse in terms similar to a mini-death, with recovery being likened to a restoration to life. Shelley had also been a frequent sleepwalker since he was a child.
[14] Ruston, op cit.
[15] Daisy Hay, Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and other tangled lives, Bloomsbury, London, 2010, at 84; Ruth Richardson, “Frankenstein: graveyards, scientific experiments and bodysnatchers”: http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/frankenstein-graveyards-scientific-experiments-and-bodysnatchers
[16] Hindle, op cit at xxvii.
[17] Holmes, op cit (Age of Wonder) at 327.
[18] Leigh Hunt, “Account of the death and cremation of Percy Bysshe Shelley, together with a description of his life and character and that of his companion Captain Williams, who was drowned with Shelley in his yacht”, Folios 1-5, transcribed by his wife Marianne https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/account-of-the-death-and-cremation-of-p-b-shelley” MS, 1822, British Library.
[19] Vivian was not found until three weeks later.
[20] Benita Eisler, Byron: child of passion; fool of fame, Penguin Books, Middlesex, 1999, at 707; “Protestant” in this context simply meant non-Catholic.
[21] Roseanne Montillo, The Lady and her Monsters, William Morrow, 2013 at 258.
[22] Edward John Trelawny, The Last Days of Shelley and Byron, 1858; extracted in John Carey (ed), Eyewitness to History, Avon Books, New York, 1987, at 301-2; “Account of the death and cremation of Percy Bysshe Shelley, together with a description of his life and character and that of his companion Captain Williams, who was drowned with Shelley in his yacht”, Folios 7ff, transcribed by Marianne Hunt https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/account-of-the-death-and-cremation-of-p-b-shelley” MS, 1822, British Library.
[23] Trelawny, op cit.
[24] Trelawny, op cit. His accounts of the episode became increasingly elaborate over the years.
[25] Leigh Hunt, op cit.
[26] Trelawny, op cit.
[27] Cited in New York Times 6 August 1955, letter to editor.
[28] Hay, op cit at 267.
[29] Claire Harman, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography, Harper Perennial, London, 2006, at 290.
[30] Eisler, op cit at 709.
[31] Various other fragments also were dispersed. Some fragments of his skull are apparently held at the New York Public Library: see Bess Lovejoy,“How Did Bits of Percy Shelley's Skull End Up in the New York Public Library?” 8 July 2013 http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/shelley-skull-fragments-at-nypl; and parts of the jawbone are in an urn in the Keats-Shelley House, along with a lock of his hair.
[32] He married his first wife Harriet when she was 16. He subsequently abandoned her and she later suicided.
[33] Hay, op cit at 254.
[34] Richard Holmes, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, Penguin Books, London, 1985, at 197; see generally Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit, NYRB Classics, 2003.
[35] Cited in Richard Holmes, “Death and Destiny”, The Guardian, 24 January 2004 http://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/jan/24/featuresreviews.guardianreview1
[36] Hay, op cit at 300ff.
[37] Hay, op cit at 301.
[38] Hermione Lee, "Shelley's Heart and Pepys's Lobsters," in Virginia’s Woolf’s Nose: Essays on Biography, Princeton University Press, 2005, at 11.
[39] Hay, op cit at 302; Shelley’s Ghost, http://shelleysghost.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/the-shelley-sanctum
[40] Now in the National Portrait Gallery.
[41] Maud Rolleston, Talks with Lady Shelley (published 1925, remembering conversations held in late 1894) http://shelleysghost.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/the-shelley-sanctum
[42] Letter by RLS to PG Hamerton, July 1881, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 1 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Letters_of_Robert_Louis_Stevenson_Volume_1/Chapter_V
[43] Named after a lighthouse in Scotland built by one of RLS’s uncles.
[44] Kidnapped was also written here.
[45] Ian Bell, Dreams of Exile: Robert Louis Stevenson, Mainstream Publishing Company, Edinburgh, 2014, at 191; Greg Buzwell,“ ‘Man is not truly one, but truly two’: duality in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde””: http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/duality-in-robert-louis-stevensons-strange-case-of-dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde. The famous Whitechapel Ripper murders, which commenced shortly after publication of Jekyll and Hyde, can also be seen in these terms.
[46] Harman, op cit at 301.
[47] Harman, op cit at 289.
[48] Lee Rowland, “To the Manner Re-born”, Dorset Life, Nov 2008 http://www.dorsetlife.co.uk/2008/11/to-the-manor-re-born/
[49] “Men of the Day” series, Vanity Fair 1879.
[50] Rowland, op cit.
[51] Letter by Fanny Stevenson to Sidney Colvin, July 1885, cited in Roger Ingpen, From Shelley In England: New Facts and Letters from the Shelley-Whitton Press (Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York, 1917.
[52] Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew (eds),The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, Eds Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, Vol V, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995, at 120-21.
[53] Ingpen, op cit.
[54] The dedication reads, “It is my hope that these surroundings of its manufacture may to some degree find favour for my story with seafarers and sea-lovers like yourselves. And at least here is the dedication from a great way off: written by the loud shores of a subtropical island near upon ten thousand miles from Boscombe Chine and Manor: scenes which rise before me as I write, along with the faces and voices of my friends. Well, I am for the sea once more; no doubt Sir Percy also”: RLS, “Dedication”, Waikiki, 17 May 1889, The Master of Ballantrae,, London: Cassell and Co, 1891, p. iii.
[55] Emily W Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality, at 395.
[56] Harman, op cit at 289.
[57] Apart from an early fling with Socialism, however, he was politically on the Conservative side.
[58] Harman, op cit at 289.
[59] Harman, op cit at 290.
[60] RLS letter to Lady Taylor, New Year 1887.
[61] Letter by RLS to WH Low, Jan 1886, The Project Gutenberg Etext of Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson Volume 2 http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/637/pg637.html
[62] [Miss] E Blantyre Simpson. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Edinburgh Days, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1914 at 62-4; accessed January 2017 at http://archive.org/stream/louisstevesimprobertrich/louisstevesimprobertrich_djvu.txt
[63] Harman, op cit at 290.
[64] Sunstein, op cit at 395.
© Philip McCouat 2017
This article may be cited as Philip McCouat, “Dr Jekyll, Frankenstein and Shelley's Heart”, Journal of Art in Society, www.artinsociety.com
Return to Home
[1] Genesis 2: 7; 21-22.
[2] Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, Penguin Books, London 1992 (Ed, Maurice Hindle).
[3] Maurice Hindle, Introduction to Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, Penguin Books, London 1992 (revised edn) Introduction at xx. The unseasonal weather in this so-called Year Without a Summer may have been influenced by the colossal and violent eruption of the volcano Mt Tambora, Indonesia, during the previous year. In one of the most powerful eruptions in recorded history, vast amounts of volcanic ash and gases were ejected into the atmosphere. Very likely as a result, there was a sustained cooling of temperatures around the world for many months: Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Tambora, the Eruption that Changed the World, Princeton University Press, 2015.
[4] Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder, Harper Press, London, 2008, at 327. As to “flirtatious – Claire was a former lover of Byron and was still smitten; Polidori made a play for an uninterested Mary.
[5] Andrew McConnell Stott, The Poet and the Vampyre: the Curse of Byron and the Birth of Literature’s Greatest Monsters, Pegasus, 2014.
[6] Mary Shelley, Preface to 1831 edition.
[7] Many of the issues in the story had been deep concerns of Shelley himself. He evidently made many suggestions, often substantial, in the drafting of the story, and was originally believed to be its author.
[8] These issues are thoroughly considered in Sharon Ruston, “The science of life and death in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein”, https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/the-science-of-life-and-death-in-mary-shelleys-frankenstein#sthash.7cuxk1wd.dpuf; and Sharon Ruston (2005) “Resurrecting Frankenstein”, The Keats-Shelley Review, 19:1, 97-116; http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1179/ksr.2005.19.1.97?needAccess=true
[9] Hindle, op cit at xiv – xvi.
[10] Ruston, op cit.
[11] Ruston, op cit
[12] Ruston, op cit.
[13] Mary Shelley’s Journal, cited in Hindle, op cit at xix; xxv. Associated with this, considerable interest was shown in the intermediate stages of suspended animation, such as comas, or even fainting or sleeping. In Frankenstein, Mary describes various incidents of fainting or collapse in terms similar to a mini-death, with recovery being likened to a restoration to life. Shelley had also been a frequent sleepwalker since he was a child.
[14] Ruston, op cit.
[15] Daisy Hay, Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and other tangled lives, Bloomsbury, London, 2010, at 84; Ruth Richardson, “Frankenstein: graveyards, scientific experiments and bodysnatchers”: http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/frankenstein-graveyards-scientific-experiments-and-bodysnatchers
[16] Hindle, op cit at xxvii.
[17] Holmes, op cit (Age of Wonder) at 327.
[18] Leigh Hunt, “Account of the death and cremation of Percy Bysshe Shelley, together with a description of his life and character and that of his companion Captain Williams, who was drowned with Shelley in his yacht”, Folios 1-5, transcribed by his wife Marianne https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/account-of-the-death-and-cremation-of-p-b-shelley” MS, 1822, British Library.
[19] Vivian was not found until three weeks later.
[20] Benita Eisler, Byron: child of passion; fool of fame, Penguin Books, Middlesex, 1999, at 707; “Protestant” in this context simply meant non-Catholic.
[21] Roseanne Montillo, The Lady and her Monsters, William Morrow, 2013 at 258.
[22] Edward John Trelawny, The Last Days of Shelley and Byron, 1858; extracted in John Carey (ed), Eyewitness to History, Avon Books, New York, 1987, at 301-2; “Account of the death and cremation of Percy Bysshe Shelley, together with a description of his life and character and that of his companion Captain Williams, who was drowned with Shelley in his yacht”, Folios 7ff, transcribed by Marianne Hunt https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/account-of-the-death-and-cremation-of-p-b-shelley” MS, 1822, British Library.
[23] Trelawny, op cit.
[24] Trelawny, op cit. His accounts of the episode became increasingly elaborate over the years.
[25] Leigh Hunt, op cit.
[26] Trelawny, op cit.
[27] Cited in New York Times 6 August 1955, letter to editor.
[28] Hay, op cit at 267.
[29] Claire Harman, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography, Harper Perennial, London, 2006, at 290.
[30] Eisler, op cit at 709.
[31] Various other fragments also were dispersed. Some fragments of his skull are apparently held at the New York Public Library: see Bess Lovejoy,“How Did Bits of Percy Shelley's Skull End Up in the New York Public Library?” 8 July 2013 http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/shelley-skull-fragments-at-nypl; and parts of the jawbone are in an urn in the Keats-Shelley House, along with a lock of his hair.
[32] He married his first wife Harriet when she was 16. He subsequently abandoned her and she later suicided.
[33] Hay, op cit at 254.
[34] Richard Holmes, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, Penguin Books, London, 1985, at 197; see generally Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit, NYRB Classics, 2003.
[35] Cited in Richard Holmes, “Death and Destiny”, The Guardian, 24 January 2004 http://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/jan/24/featuresreviews.guardianreview1
[36] Hay, op cit at 300ff.
[37] Hay, op cit at 301.
[38] Hermione Lee, "Shelley's Heart and Pepys's Lobsters," in Virginia’s Woolf’s Nose: Essays on Biography, Princeton University Press, 2005, at 11.
[39] Hay, op cit at 302; Shelley’s Ghost, http://shelleysghost.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/the-shelley-sanctum
[40] Now in the National Portrait Gallery.
[41] Maud Rolleston, Talks with Lady Shelley (published 1925, remembering conversations held in late 1894) http://shelleysghost.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/the-shelley-sanctum
[42] Letter by RLS to PG Hamerton, July 1881, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 1 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Letters_of_Robert_Louis_Stevenson_Volume_1/Chapter_V
[43] Named after a lighthouse in Scotland built by one of RLS’s uncles.
[44] Kidnapped was also written here.
[45] Ian Bell, Dreams of Exile: Robert Louis Stevenson, Mainstream Publishing Company, Edinburgh, 2014, at 191; Greg Buzwell,“ ‘Man is not truly one, but truly two’: duality in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde””: http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/duality-in-robert-louis-stevensons-strange-case-of-dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde. The famous Whitechapel Ripper murders, which commenced shortly after publication of Jekyll and Hyde, can also be seen in these terms.
[46] Harman, op cit at 301.
[47] Harman, op cit at 289.
[48] Lee Rowland, “To the Manner Re-born”, Dorset Life, Nov 2008 http://www.dorsetlife.co.uk/2008/11/to-the-manor-re-born/
[49] “Men of the Day” series, Vanity Fair 1879.
[50] Rowland, op cit.
[51] Letter by Fanny Stevenson to Sidney Colvin, July 1885, cited in Roger Ingpen, From Shelley In England: New Facts and Letters from the Shelley-Whitton Press (Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York, 1917.
[52] Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew (eds),The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, Eds Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, Vol V, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995, at 120-21.
[53] Ingpen, op cit.
[54] The dedication reads, “It is my hope that these surroundings of its manufacture may to some degree find favour for my story with seafarers and sea-lovers like yourselves. And at least here is the dedication from a great way off: written by the loud shores of a subtropical island near upon ten thousand miles from Boscombe Chine and Manor: scenes which rise before me as I write, along with the faces and voices of my friends. Well, I am for the sea once more; no doubt Sir Percy also”: RLS, “Dedication”, Waikiki, 17 May 1889, The Master of Ballantrae,, London: Cassell and Co, 1891, p. iii.
[55] Emily W Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality, at 395.
[56] Harman, op cit at 289.
[57] Apart from an early fling with Socialism, however, he was politically on the Conservative side.
[58] Harman, op cit at 289.
[59] Harman, op cit at 290.
[60] RLS letter to Lady Taylor, New Year 1887.
[61] Letter by RLS to WH Low, Jan 1886, The Project Gutenberg Etext of Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson Volume 2 http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/637/pg637.html
[62] [Miss] E Blantyre Simpson. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Edinburgh Days, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1914 at 62-4; accessed January 2017 at http://archive.org/stream/louisstevesimprobertrich/louisstevesimprobertrich_djvu.txt
[63] Harman, op cit at 290.
[64] Sunstein, op cit at 395.
© Philip McCouat 2017
This article may be cited as Philip McCouat, “Dr Jekyll, Frankenstein and Shelley's Heart”, Journal of Art in Society, www.artinsociety.com
Return to Home