Curating Frankenstein, History of Medicine Society, March 22, 2018

- [Donna Hirst] And I hope you stay for the open house in the John Martin Rare Books room, this is the first time we've tried to pair a lecture with the open house and I'm expecting that it's going to be wonderful because thinking and looking, that'll be good. So because the lecture, because we're having the open house, we're having the lecture in 401. Often we have these lectures over in Murph in 2117 but since we're here, we can have food because it's allowed and over in the medical building it's not allowed. For those of you who are long term History of Medicine Society members, you might remember that our official snack isFig Newtons and so we have acquired Fig Newtons for anyone who wants. - [Audience Member] I'm quite the fan of Fig Newtons. - [Donna Hirst] Yeah, yeah. Also on the back table there's a sign up sheet for the History of Medicine listserv, there's not a lot of traffic, mostly it's a few notices a month about events and lectures and things that are happening. So feel free to put your name and email address. So now I get to introduce Peter Balestrieri. - [Peter Balestrieri] Close enough. - [Donna Hirst] Peter earned his MA in the University of Iowa's School of Library and Information Science in December 2013 and is currently working at the University of Iowa's Special Collections in the university archives. Peter is the Curator of the Science Fiction and Popular Culture Collections and works with fan zines, general science fiction, and a wide range of popular culture materials. He catalogs materials, works with the public, teaches, and provides outreach for his collections. He's been involved in the creation of a number of University Library exhibits, the Star Trek exhibit was a particularly popular exhibit. Peter was a professional musician in his previous life. Fans of the 1980s and '90s alternative rock and pop would likely recognize the band he played with, the Violent Femmes. Balestrieri played saxophone. So I'd like to welcome Peter to our podium. - [Peter Balestrieri] Thanks. Thank you so much, it's a real pleasure for me to be here, I'd like to thank Donna both for that introduction and for this opportunity. I'd also quickly like to thank people who work in Special Collections that are also involved and also from Hardin who are involved. The two people that came up with the idea for this Frankenstein exhibition, Carolyn Hogan and Liz Riordon. And then I have been helped a lot by Lindsay Moen and by Damien Irich, who helped a lot with the nuts and bolts of the PowerPoint display, which is still, for the most part, a mystery to me how these things translate to the screen. So I have some things to show you, when I'm generally doing this talk which has been developing over many years, it takes me anywhere from an hour and a half to two hours, I drag every possible thing we have in Special Collections out on to tables, I walk around the tables, I get to move my arms around a lot and point at things. I won't be able to do that today but we do have some nice things included in the open house for you to see if you can stay to see those. I'll be talking about some of those in just a few minutes. This all began for me when the head of Special Collections, Greg Prickman, asked me if I would look through our collections and find everything that we had relating to material history of Frankenstein. So when I say that, what I'm talking about is not the text, I'm not talking about what's actually the content of Frankenstein, I'm talking about everything that led to the writing of the book, the publishing of the book, the legacy of the book, et cetera, et cetera. So I will mention a few things from the inside the text, but that's really not my area. I'm not a scholar and that's up to people from the English department to deal with, I do manage to teach Frankenstein every now and then and our materials to undergrads and introduction to lit classes that are taught by teaching assistants, those are a lot of fun, I have seen people fall asleep during those, hopefully that won't happen today but feel free if you're compelled, as they often are, to doze off. This begins in only, for me, one possible way, and that's with Mary Shelley. And so for me, as I began to look into this, nothing was more important than Mary Shelley, nothing was more important than the story of an 18 year old woman who, surrounded by people not much older than she was, who had already established reputations for themselves as writers of poetry and English begins to write what has become one of the most popular novels written in the last 200 years and we're celebrating the 200th anniversary this year. There we see Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley received their authors' copies on January 1st of 1818. So as I say, nothing to me is more important than Mary. Mary's life, so much of it, goes directly into that book Frankenstein, different pieces of it are drawn straight out of her own life, she's only 18 years old but she starts out life as the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the most important feminists of the late 18th and early 19th century. She bears her mother's name, Wollstonecraft, her mother's last name stays in her name. This is, I'm going to digress a lot, that's what I do, that's how I do this, so it might get a little dizzy at times but stick with me. So I gave this talk or a variation on it a week ago in Orlando at the annual conference of the International Association for the Fantastic and the Arts, this is a conference of scholars, international scholars, professional authors, graduate students, librarians, archivists, it's a wonderful conference and I heard so many great panels, and hearing so many different people thinking and talking about Frankenstein, I really became curious about something that, to me, seems to be a great sort of, a great sort of place for speculation about this whole story and that is naming, names and naming. So Mary Shelley herself, Mary Wollstonecraft, this is her mother's name, add to that her father's name Godwin, and then add to that the name of her husband, Shelley, so she's Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley. Echoing her creature, the creature of in Frankenstein, she's made up of all of these different names, all these different parts make up her name. She runs off with Percy Shelley who's married and who has children when she's only 16 and they travel to Europe, they begin making the grand tour, they travel along the Rhine, they pass through a small town near Darmstadt called Frankenstein on the outskirts of the village of Frankenstein is the Castle Frankenstein, so this is Mary's first introduction to the name, to the idea of the castle. They may or may not, so much of this is speculation, they may or may not have heard stories about an alchemist who was born at Castle Frankenstein named Conrad Dippel, a couple of hundred years before they get there. Dippel is an alchemist and a chemist, he's experimenting with cyanide and other things, he was born there as I say, later on he tries to buy it, tries to buy Castle Frankenstein to conduct experiments there, he's denied. They would have probably have heard stories about Dippel, they would have heard about a literary salon that was meeting in Castle Frankenstein at times to read all kinds of different literary work but especially things of a supernatural origin, ghost stories, stories of the occult and again, this is Mary's life, Mary's life finding its way into the books. They traveled through the Alps and Mary begins to see ice and snow for the first time and begins to describe ice and snow in her journal and then while she's working on Frankenstein she's also editing travel journals, her travel journals and Percy's travel journals and that eventually gets published in 1817. So 16 years old, she's traveling with Percy, they come back to England, her father really upset with her. Let's advance, let's move on. Oh her father's really upset with her, her father, William Godwin, I don't know what to say about William Godwin other than what an incredible hypocrite. This is a man who has been for years advancing the philosophy of free love, of socialism, of atheism with Mary's mother, his first wife, Mary Wollstonecraft. He's been advancing this idea of free love, the idea that marriage isn't important, that what's important is a loving relationship, that that's what you're trying to get out of life. The marriage between Shelley and his wife was well known to be a poor marriage, a bad marriage, they hadn't lived together in a long time. Shelley doesn't just have interest in Mary, his original interest is in Godwin himself. He goes to Godwin as a young man who admires Godwin's philosophies, wants to learn from him. Finds out that Godwin is in terrible debt, as he was for most of his life, and offers to pay off a lot of Godwin's debt, which he does. And offers to pay off more thinking that he has a close relationship with Godwin, when Percy Shelley decides to run off with Mary for the first time, he goes to Godwin and says I have this attachment to Mary now and Mary feels the same way and we're going to go off to Europe together. And Godwin says absolutely not, this is never going to happen, how dare you, he becomes irate, he begins to play the typical irate father and Mary and Percy plot this all out and eventually they take off. Well being William Godwin, he doesn't just do nothing about it, he has to write about it and so the book that you see here, again, this is one of the books that you can see out on a table in the room later. This is the elopement of Shelley and Mary. 200 of these were printed, I think this is copy 126 and what it is, this is from 1911. What this is is sort of a sandwiched affair, the first part of it is an introduction to the whole story that I just relayed to you, the middle of it is the actual letter that was written by William Godwin to a money lender named John Taylor. Godwin has lost his cash cow, which was Percy Shelley, and is looking for money and he's writing to John Taylor, a money lender, and I believe and the writer of this book believes that he's doing this to try to get into Taylor's good graces so that Taylor will lend him a lot of money. And in this letter he goes on both to vilify his own daughter and Percy Shelley. And the second part of the book is a long essay by a man named Buxton who goes on to reiterate the same accusation against Godwin, that he's being disingenuous, that there are some outright lies, some half lies, that he's doing this terrible hatchet job on his own daughter and on Percy Shelley who's been more than good to him. From this, you can see, this is from the letter "You are already acquainted with the name of Shelley, "the gentleman who more than 12 months ago "undertook by his assistance to rescue me "from my pecuniary difficulties. "Not to keep you longer in suspense, "he, a married man, has run away with my daughter. I cannot conceive of an event of more accumulated horror." Well Mary will come up with a tale of more accumulated horror. Obviously a much better imagination than her father. He goes on to say "I had been of opinion from the first "that Mary had only been withheld from ruin by her mind "and in that by a series of the most consummate "dissimulation, she made me believe I had succeeded. "I formed the plan of sending her from home knowing the violence of Shelley's temper." And here we see it, Percy Shelley does not have a violent temper, there are no other accounts to match this of his violent temper, he doesn't become angry at the meeting between the two of them when he tells Godwin that he's going to run off with Mary so this business of the violence of Shelley's temper, this is just something he's conveying to Taylor. "And far from certain what scenes he might "be capable of acting, but I was well aware "that in sending her from home I should be doing good "if she concurred with me and concealed her retreat "from her betrayer, but that if she were capable "of an opposite conduct I should be rather throwing her into his power." Again, just an incredibly disingenuous letter but in a very nice edition from 1911. So that second trip that they make, they return from that first trip, they're pariahs, society scorns them, the Shelleys, the Godwins want nothing to do with them. Shelley is cut off by his family from any kind of funds, they begin to struggle, things go from bad to worse. Her stepsister, Fanny Imlay committed suicide. Then not too much later, Shelley's wife who is pregnant by another man, again this was not a good marriage, she was not pining away for Percy Shelley, she hated Percy Shelley, her family hated Percy Shelley, she's pregnant, pardon me, with another man and commits suicide. Shortly thereafter, Percy and Mary are finally married and they plan another trip to Europe and they take along Mary's other stepsister, Claire Clairmont, who's real name was Jane, but again, this is part of this whole thing that I see running through the whole story of the writing of Frankenstein. This whole idea of naming, names and naming, and how this is constantly in play. Her sister's name is Jane and she begins to call herself Clara and she tries out a couple of other names and finally settles on Claire. So Claire and Percy and Mary leave for Europe. Also on the grand tour at the same time, Byron, Lord Byron, and his personal physician, his very young personal physician, John Polidori. And Polidori is the youngest graduate of the Edinburgh School of Medicine, at 19 he becomes a doctor, and this is unprecedented. And in a meeting, in a social way is introduced to Byron, Byron says oh I'm going to Europe and to Greece, why don't you come along and Polidori, who has literary aspirations, jumps at the chance. So Byron and Polidori are traveling, the Shelleys and Claire Clairmont are traveling, and Byron rents this house, this villa on the shores of Lake Geneva, the Villa Diodati. Now the Villa Diodati is also famous because Villa Diodati, one of its most famous occupants was Milton, and Milton writes portions of Paradise Lost here. So again, this connection to Paradise Lost, to Frankenstein, and the Shelleys, the Shelleys, they rent a house very close by, the Maison Chapuis, close enough for them to walk over whenever they feel like it and to spend the evenings, all of them to spend the evenings together. So though it's a terrible cliche, it's 1816, it's June, it's the worst summer in European history, why? Because there have been volcanic eruptions in Indonesia, the skies have been filled with ash and all over the world they're experiencing some of the worst weather everybody can remember. There are critics, literary critics who now believe that it's the gray stormy summer and this whole year that's sort of the birth of the Romantic movement, it fuels their obsessions. The night of the, the famous night of the ghost writing competition's birth is a particularly dark and stormy night, lots of electrical activity going on, lightning crashing into the lake and everywhere else, and what are they doing? They're all reading ghost stories to each other. They're reading German ghost stories translated into French, and the book is called Fantasmagoriana. Fantasmagoriana, those stories not translated into Engilsh until the 20th century and then not all of the stories, only some of them and it wasn't until 2004 that actually all of the stories from Fantasmagoriana were actually translated into English so we have that now and can read the same stories that they were actually reading. After scaring each other as much as possible reading these stories, they decide, Byron is the one who suggests it, he says you know we are all writers, we are all literary people, why don't we all try to write ghost stories, and everyone agrees. So almost immediately, they all begin. Byron begins a story but doesn't finish it, it's eventually published in a book of his poems called Mazeppa. Percy Shelley doesn't really write anything, he recounts a number of ghost stories that have been told to him by a friend, an acquaintance, and Claire Clairmont begins a story. We know because there is mention of it in Mary Shelley's journals, but never been found, lost, so we don't know what Claire Clairmont wrote. It's John Polidori and it's Mary Shelley who write the two lasting and incredibly influential books that come out of this dark and stormy night. Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein and John Polidori writing the Vampyre. The Vampyre is the first vampire story written in English, it is the first time that Nosferatu, vampires before Polidori are misshapen creatures with huge swollen heads and big ears and long pointy fingernails, huge fangs, they are monsters and it's Polidori who's thinking about his relationship with Byron, it's Polidori who invents a young aristocratic, seductive vampire who uses up his friends, eats up his friends and then casts them aside. That's what's happening between Byron and Polidori as Polidori begins to write the story, he's no longer in Byron's good graces, the Shelleys, it's not a very pretty picture but the Shelleys and Byron engage in this sort of constant teasing of Polidori, they called him poor Polidori, they mocked him, and he pours a lot of these ill feelings into his book. Mary begins writing Frankenstein. One of my favorite things that we have in Special Collections relating to all of this is the letter that Mary Shelley begins writing to her very good friend Marianne Hunt and the book is finished, it's 1817, she's finished writing the book and they're trying to have it published so the first thing they do is they send it to Shelley's publisher, Ollier, and Ollier is not someone who's going to publish a book about bodies being torn up, sewn back together, activated by lightning, this is not who Ollier is. Ollier is a publisher of fine poetry, his clients are the aristocracy, the upper class of England, he turns it down. Then they send it to Byron's publisher, John Murray. John Murray is interested, he thinks it's an interesting book, he wants to publish it. He asks a friend, what do you think? The friend that he asks is someone who has a very low opinion of Percy Shelley, considers him to be a radical, a socialist, tells Murray you don't want to have anything to do with something written by Percy Shelley, well why did he think it's been written by Percy Shelley, and now we come back to names and naming. Because, like so many books in both the 18th century and then into the 19th century, it's published anonymously. It's sent out anonymously. It's sent out by Percy Shelley, and so there's every reason for anyone to believe that it's actually by Shelley, it's a departure for him so they think that's why he's writing it anonymously. They think it's by Shelley and so he drops it, Murray drops it, sends them the rejection. So Marianne is getting this letter from Shelley, Marianne Hunt, the wife of Leigh Hunt. These things, by the way, from our Leigh Hunt collection, blessed to have an amazing collection of Romantic era materials all collected by Brewer. And part of our Leigh Hunt collection, they actually have Leigh Hunt's fireplace. We have two of them because they came from a room that had a fireplace on both sides of the wall so two rooms could share the same fireplace so we have the fireplace surround from both rooms, sent to us by a relative of Leigh Hunt's from California. This letter is being written, two women who are both pregnant and they're talking to each other about things like hiring nannies, how do you take care of the house when you don't have any money, I mean these are very practical things, Marianne Hunt is a good friend of Mary Shelley's and Mary has already lost two children and they're talking about all kinds of health problems, they're also talking about money problems because Leigh Hunt is always broke, he's always one step out of debtor's prison. The Shelleys have been helping him out little by little. At one point in the letter, Mary Shelley says I'm sending you three pounds, not a small amount in those days. And I always like to think that Percy Shelley sees Mary writing the letter and says oh who are you writing to? And Mary Shelley says I'm writing to Marianne Hunt and Percy says well when you're done, let me tack a few lines on. So that's exactly what happens, and we can see from the transcription that Mary ends her letter, you can see where it says I send you three pounds, I have look at this, at this laser, "I send you three pounds, "Shelley sends his love to you all and thanks "for your good wishes and promised present. "Pray when is this intended parcel to come? Affectionately yours, MWS." Now she does say affectionately yours, she does say at the beginning my dear Marianne, but this is the end of the 18th century and so things are so very formal, and again, naming, names and naming. MWS, she doesn't say affectionately yours Mary. She leaves her initials for Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Now Percy picks it up. "I will write Hunt tomorrow or the day after," and Leigh Hunt is a good friend of his, but they all call each other by their last names. - [Audience Member] Who is Leigh Hunt? - [Peter Balestrieri] Leigh Hunt is a literary figure in England, he has a journal, he knows all of the principal players in the Romantic movement, he's publishing their work in his journal, he's getting reviews for other works for them and of their work and, like I say, he always has money troubles and he and his wife Marianne are close friends of the Shelleys. - [Audience Member] Thank you. - [Peter Balestrieri] You're welcome. And so he says "I will write Hunt tomorrow "or the day after, meanwhile kindest remembrance to all "and thanks for your dream in my favor. "Your incantations have not been quite powerful enough to expel evil from all revolutions of time." Amazing letter writing, is it not? Is this not? And to me, he can't write anything and not have it come out poetry. "From all revolutions of time," here we go, this is what's extraordinary. "Poor Mary's book came back with a refusal which has put me rather in ill spirits." So he doesn't say Frankenstein but he says poor Mary's book and reveals to Marianne Hunt that they're having some trouble getting it published. "Does any kind friend of yours, Marianne, "know any bookseller or has any influence with one? Any of those good-tempered Robinsons?" Don't forget, Percy Shelley's only 24, 25 years old. He's not that much older than Mary. Byron's only a few years older, these are young people. They're rock stars, they're on tour, they're touring around Europe and though he has a reputation, he is getting things published, he is still at the very beginning of his career and doesn't have a lot of connections to fall back on. And "any of those good-tempered Robinsons," Robinson is a well-known liberal publisher, he's hoping for somebody like that. "All these things are affairs of interest "and preconception, immediately you have seen Clark "about this loan, well is there any proposal, anything in bodily shape, my signature," and they're going into detail about money matters because when you're dealing with the Hunts it's all about money, it's all about money and money matters and loans, et cetera et cetera. "And then your faithful friend, PBS." Again, with the initials, the formality. And who does it finally get published by? By James Lackington's publishing company. James Lackington, who again, like I said before, it's all about Mary Shelley, well yes but it's also, for me, a lot about Lackington because of the way that I came to Lackington. James Lackington is an amazing sort of figure, he is the son of a shoemaker, he is a shoemaker himself but he has, he's a deeply religious man and one of his deeply held religious beliefs is that reading will lead people to god. And so the most important thing in his mind is how to get more books into the hands of more people, not just the upper class, not just the middle class, but how do we get poor people, people who can't afford to buy books to begin to read and begin to make this sort of spiritual leap. And he is a relative success along with his partner Jones in the shoe trade in Somerset and then he finally convinces his wife that they should move to London and they should go into the book trade, and that's what they do. And there's a great apocryphal story, they're down to the end of their money and they have about a half crown left and just like Jack and the beanstalk, Jack's mother, she sends James out to get some food with the last of their money and what does he come back with? He doesn't come back with magic beans, he comes back with a work of poetry and his wife says oh my god, what do you suppose we're going to eat? And he looks at her and he says if I had brought food back, we would have eaten that food tonight and we would have become hungry again, but this book of poetry will feed our souls for the rest of our lives. And it's a great story, who knows if its true or not, but it's a great story and it bears directly on the kind of a person that Lackington was. I first began to look into biographies of Mary Shelley, and you know I'm not reading one or two, I think I read somewhere close to 15 and in each one of those biographies, written at different periods of time, whenever they get to Lackington, they say something bad, something negative, Lackington, oh secondhand bookstore. Lackington, only publishing weird books, books of the occult, books about necromancy or they'll say they couldn't get it published by a decent publisher so they went to Lackington. And so, in biography after biography, including those written in the late 20th century, recent biographies, I thought why, who is this Lackington, why do they all go out of their way to say something bad about Lackington? And so I begin to look into James Lackington and when I do, oh and by the way this is from 1791, we also have a 1794 out on the table for you to see. This is his memoirs and in this he expresses his whole philosophy, his life history, the history of himself as a bookseller and wait until I begin to tell you some things about Lackington, this is not somebody who deserved the kind of reputation that he's been given. So here we go. Lackington begins his bookselling business and he comes up with some extraordinary developments, he invents remaindering, so anyone who knows what remaindering is, books being marked down. We go into bookstores and we see expensive books marked down to $1.25, Lackington invents remaindering. At this time in history, booksellers, when they can't get rid of their backlog, they either sell them in huge lots, they might be sold for scrap, they might be sold piecemeal but they don't hang on to them, they don't have any use for them. Lackington begins to buy up these lots, he begins to buy up their backlogs and they're laughing at him behind his back. How did he possibly make any money? He's nobody. We know how to make money. So what Lackington believes is, and this becomes his motto, from small things, great things grow. And so Lackington begins to sell these volumes that he's buying for just pennies over what he's paid for them, expecting to make his money back through volume, and he does. The other thing that he does which is just so revolutionary and makes every other bookseller in London livid with rage, he refuses credit. He refuses credit to anybody. At this time, if you were wealthy you didn't pay for anything, even if you were part of the middle class. It was more common to have a charge account at the better booksellers, and then you wouldn't pay off, you would never pay off your book bill. They would be handed down from generation to generation for some of these places and they felt that they had to do it to be able to have the clientele that they had and to be able to brag about their clientele. The Duke of so and so only buys his books from me, the Countess of so and so only buys her books here, and so this was an important thing in their minds. That isn't where Lackington was focused, he was focused on a completely different clientele so that was one of the first things he did. No credit, you don't need credit, my books are cheap enough so that you don't need them. He begins to make a lot of money and he builds the Temple of the Muses. The Temple of the Muses, you can see it in Finsbury Square it's in a fashionable part of London, it is an enormous building occupying almost an entire city block, it's four stories tall. The interior, this is the first floor, the clerks' station, and if, they bragged that you could drive a coach and six horses around the clerks' island, that's how big it was. They began, they opened with 250,000 volumes for sale, making it the biggest bookstore in all of Europe. Not exactly the Lackington that you find in the biographies of Mary Shelley. Who's going to Lackington's? Everyone is going to Lackington's. The first floor has the new books and the most expensive books. If you look off to the left, you see this little area at the top of the stairs, this is another Lackington innovation, it's a free reading room. So anyone, regardless of how much money they have, can come to Lackington's and go into the reading room and sit down and look at all the newest books that are being published, and many people take advantage of this. One of the people that takes advantage of it is the very young John Keats, he starts as a young boy going to Lackington's and spending hours and hours and hours in the reading room. As he grows into manhood and begins writing poetry, he's still going to Lackington's and it's in the reading room of Lackington's that he begins to talk about his poetry with two Lackington employees who decide that they're going to go into the publishing business themselves, and they publish John Keats. So again, this connection to fostering all kinds of different literary achievements. As you rose up through the levels of Lackington's, the books become cheaper and cheaper, and when you get all the way up to the top, that's where the cheapest books are. So if you want the cheapest books, you have to take that walk up the stairs. From this cupola, whenever Lackington was on the premises of the store, he wanted a flag flown and they did, they flew a flag and that's so that people knew he was there and they could come and talk to him. He wanted to talk to people, he wanted to meet people and so the cupola bore that flag. As a rich man, he had his own carriage with crests that he designed himself and his motto from small things, great things come on the door and he loved to ride through the streets of London throwing money out of the windows of the carriage and sometimes books as well. No you're kidding me. Five minutes. Oh you know, this is just. So John Polidori, I talked about him. The greatest vampire book, he writes this, it's published in 1819, again anonymously. Everyone thinks Byron's written it and the publisher who doesn't ask Polidori if he can publish it, first it's published anonymously in a magazine, Polidori doesn't give his permission, they get a copy of it and they publish it. And then as he's trying to deny that it's Byron's, it comes out as a book and Byron writes a letter and says it's not mine, Polidori writes and says it's not Byron's, the publisher's not going to do anything about it because he's selling tons of them because everyone thinks it's by Byron. Again, names, naming. Polidori continues trying to be a writer, his work doesn't sell very well, he begins to gamble a lot, he begins to drink, he becomes incredibly depressed and he commits suicide, he commits suicide by drinking prussic acid. He creates this first sort of very sexy aristocratic kind of a vampire where seduction, it's as much about seduction as it is about drinking blood. And you know it takes us all the way through the legacy into Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire. The likes of Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt. We're back to Godwin, Godwin is shameless. He can smell money and so he sees the success that Mary's book is having after it's published and five years after it's published, in 1823 the first play is produced. Frankenstein is the most dramatized work of any work in the English language. To date, about 90 different dramatizations exist and I'm not counting films now, just plays of Frankenstein. In the first three years, from 1823 to 1826, 14 different productions of Frankenstein are touring around. This is a letter that we have in Special Collections and you can see it outside in just a minute, of Godwin writing to Mary Shelley. He sends the letter to Genoa, and isn't this amazing to be able to see the red wax still on the letter. The letter is folded up, there are no envelopes. The letter is folded and then a red wax stamp seals it. He sends it to Genoa, they're not at Genoa, it's crossed out, London is written down. Mary's already on her way back. In the letter, he's basically saying "my dear Mary," this is the same woman that he calls her a liar, he calls her a tramp, a few other bad things in that original letter to his hopefully a new money lender. And now she's dear Mary, "I write these few lines "merely to tell you that Frankenstein was acted last night "for the first time and with success. "I have therefore ordered 500 copies of the novel "to be printed with all dispatch, "the whole profits of which, "without a penny deduction, shall be your own. "I am most impatient and anxious to see you and am ever most affectionately yours, W. Godwin." This is her father, "most affectionately yours, W. Godwin." That formality again, names and naming. At this time, Godwin and his second wife have a publishing house, who do you think he's talking about when he says "I have therefore ordered 500 copies of the novel to be printed with all dispatch," yeah, his own company, and without a penny deduction except the cost of the book and our charges. No no no, William Godwin, terrible, he's not James Lackington, I can tell you that. This is that very first production by Peake, Peake's Presumption, and acted by [T.P.] Cooke. Mary eventually comes back to London, she sees the play, she loves it. [T.P.] Cooke has blue makeup, they make his face light blue, this is the first time that the creature has a different colored face and Mary writes they gave him a blue face and I like it, it works really well. I think this is a great thing. They'll change the color of his face in these plays and different productions, they try to outdo each other to kill off the creature. They come up with every possible way for the creature to die, and it becomes this very very popular theatrical production, many different productions, to rival the success of the book itself. By 1931, it's early in the century, Edison has a version of Frankenstein. By 1931 they get, nobody that's young, I talk to classes all the time who have no idea who Boris Karloff is, have never seen this movie, it means absolutely nothing to them. To them, Frankenstein is a Halloween mask and a cartoon character. Frankenstein has undergone this, just like with Lovecraft's characters, has undergone this bizarre sort of a transformation from being a figure of terror to something really cute and funny, it's inexplicable to me at any rate, it's inexplicable. We have two fine press editions of, and you can read about these and see them out on the tables in just a minute or so. This is the one from 1934, it's fine press edition by Limited Editions, illustrated by Everett Henry. It's a particular favorite of mine because Everett Henry does something really really interesting, he decides that every illustration in the book will be from the creature's point of view so we never see anything other than what the creature sees, and I think that's really really special because we don't see that in other editions. Another wonderful fine press edition, Pennyroyal Press this time from the '80s, illustrated by the great Barry Moser. And Moser takes the traditional, more traditional route for illustration and gives us some spectacular visions of the creature and of other things connected to the story. The opening slide that we saw, Castle Frankenstein way up on top of that mountain, his own interpretation. Not reality. And this is where I would end up by saying we've come so far of this legacy, so many films over decades and decades of Frankenstein, definitely the good, the bad, and the ugly. Penny Dreadful, a television series that's come out in the last few years, excellent sort of an imaginative treatment of Frankenstein and the whole story, and most recently Frankenstein Chronicles, the great actor Sean Bean from Game of Thrones and many other things, also excellent, can't recommend that highly enough. This, though, YouTube, you can see this on YouTube for free and it's absolutely extraordinary. Again, names and naming, the Frankenstein character is an android who has a name, he's an android astronaut, something like Major John Smith but he's actually an android, they keep that secret. He is the Frankenstein of the movie, and who does he meet? He meets the space monster, the space monster doesn't have a name, Frankenstein who had no name in Mary's book, who then somehow inherits Victor Frankenstein's name, now we always think of the creature as Frankenstein. Another sort of an inversion of that. Here we have a poor creature, again, who has no name, not unlike the original Frankenstein. So catch this if you can. I know this is the time for questions but before I open this up for questions, I have to just talk for a couple minutes about something that came to me at this conference, head of University Libraries John Culshaw is here, thank you so much for allowing me and making it possible for me to go to conferences and speak to people about things from the collections. I gave a version of this at ICFA in Florida and I heard so many great panels and my mind was just racing, racing with this idea of names and naming, so let me just run a couple of things past you. Who or what is Frankenstein? It's a text by Mary Shelley written when she was 18 years old, published two years later. It is the name of the main character, to her, the main character in the novel, Victor Frankenstein, that's who she names the book after. It's not called the creature, it's called Frankenstein, it's named after Victor Frankenstein. And then we have the creature who has no name in the novel, but who now we, and who popular culture always associates with this name Frankenstein. It goes beyond this in so many different ways, but I'll give you just one more example, and I'm happy to talk to anyone about this and bend your ear when we're all done but the name Shelley. In academia, for who knows how long because I don't know when these shifts happened, I'm just throwing this out, thinking about it, wondering about it, Shelley is Percy Shelley. For decades and decades and decades, whenever an academic says Shelley, they are referring to Percy Shelley and other academics know immediately, yes, this academic has just said Shelley, that's Percy Shelley. But at some point, people stopped reading Ozymandias, revolt in Islam, and everybody just keeps reading Frankenstein, Frankenstein, Frankenstein, Frankenstein. And so at some point, the same way that Frankenstein stops being the doctor only to become the creature, Shelley stops being Percy Shelley and begins to become Mary Shelley. Now chances are if you're in EPB and you're listening to a conversation between English professors, if they're talking about Shelley, they're probably talking about Mary Shelley, not Percy Shelley. And at this conference that I was at for four days, scholars from all over the world were constantly saying Shelley, Shelley, Shelley, and not one of them was talking about Percy Shelley, so lots of interesting things, this story is not done, this novel is not done, the material history of Frankenstein is not over. Thank you so much for letting me come here and talk to you about this, questions? Please. - [Audience Member] Is Lackington's still a building that exists in London? - [Peter Balestrieri] Burned down, burned down in the 1840s. Yeah, yeah, amazing though. I mean we see these images of it which are so great and then you know, luckily, luckily, to counteract and to lend evidence to what I'm talking about, there are many many descriptions, by all kinds of people from different walks of life, of what it was like to go to Lackington's and they are all filled with awe and wonder at how amazing this bookstore was, not the bookstore that's in all of these biographies of Mary Shelley, I believe that those negative descriptions of Lackington, I can't verify this yet, I mean I'm not doing the research, I believe that it was a lot of these wealthier booksellers who were jealous of Lackington who spread these ideas and they were picked up by researchers who were looking in the books where Lackington would have come off with a bad reputation. Certainly the evidence is there for anyone to see, this is not who Lackington was, but again the story gets repeated over and over and over. - [Audience Member] Two part question, one, what year was the Temple of the Muses built? - [Peter Balestrieri] 1793, 1794, and Lackington actually retires and sells the business or at least he gives parts of the business to different people that he's worked with, both from his family and his partner Jones, so when it's finally published, it is published by that new company which is an amalgam of all the people he's given pieces to. He's retired, so he doesn't actually publish Frankenstein, it's the company that he's started that does it. - [Audience Member] The second part was what floor, do you know what floor it was on? - [Peter Balestrieri] What floor that is? - [Audience Member] No, what floor was Frankenstein sold from? - [Peter Balestrieri] That's a great question, I would imagine it was sold from the first floor. Part of the deal that was struck, and you can see this thing that I'm going to mention now in one of Percy Shelley's letters to Lackington, when he made the original deal, it was a very small amount, even for those times, 500. And very plain, but not untypical grayish blue boards, published in three volumes, which was also typical for the time, with very simple boards, not a fancy book. And part of the deal was Lackington promised to advertise, and they're all becoming aware of the power of advertising and Percy says yeah, that's what I want. I want that advertising, if you throw that into the deal, we have a deal, and so that's not happening and so we have the letter of, we don't have it in Special Collections, but we have the letter of Percy Shelley writing to Lackington to say hey you promised advertising, where's the advertising? So interesting. - [Donna Hirst] So there's the creature and there's the vampire, how did zombies get into that? You know about zombies right? - [Peter Balestrieri] I do. A little bit, a little bit. I'm not Brooks Landon from the English department who is my go to authority on zombies. But you know zombies are, in essence, they are another member of the undead. So they share that quality with all other undead creatures of mythology and the, if you're older like myself, I grew up with slow-moving zombies, Haitian zombies, zombies that come out of voodoo, and those zombies are much, excuse me, much more tied to the idea of slavery so they are workers, someone is dead or someone is alive and can be turned into a zombie and then they will work for you untiringly. They will do whatever you say. They don't eat, they don't need to sleep, and so those are some of the first sort of zombies that we see, but zombies undergo many many changes across the decades depending on who's telling that zombie story and we've moved so far away from those slow-moving, very mummy-like sort of zombies to now, a zombie that's much more characterized by something like the works of George Romero in Night of the Living Dead. And then all of the critical work that's been written in terms of the new sort of zombie explosion having a lot to do with AIDS and having a lot to do with people's fears of infection. So tied to a very medical, a very sort of health base that isn't there with Haitian voodoo zombies at all. But zombies as creatures of the undead, as all creatures of the undead, again, are constantly morphing, constantly changing with the times and so we always kind of wind up with undead creatures to fit our times, to suit our times. Yeah, but so many people writing about zombies in wonderful ways, Brooks Landon being one of them. Anyone else? Oh please. - [Audience Member] So did Shelley ever respond to her father? - [Peter Balestrieri] You know, she may have, she winds up back in England I think maybe before this letter would have reached her. She does reconcile with him to a degree, she reconciles to a degree with the Shelleys who now want to be around their last surviving child, Mary and Percy Shelley's last surviving child so they lose three children in early years and it's only Percy who survives, and like grandparents everywhere, a lot of sins get forgiven so that the grandparents can see those grandkids. And that still goes on today, so it's a common story. But yeah, there is a lot of reconciling, I mean success is a great sort of medicine, right? It works wonders in this story. Mary never really, I don't think ever reconciles completely with the Shelleys, the Shelleys are terrible snobs and her heritage through Mary Wollstonecraft and Godwin, it's not considered to be anything, it's way down here somewhere. It's radical, it's not something to be proud of that your son deserted his wife, and then who is Mary Shelley even as a success, she's a successful writer of this incredibly weird story that draws on all these influences from her life, the galvanism experiments that she saw as a young girl, that she was taken to as a young girl, Shelley's interests in, Percy Shelley's interest in the occult, he translated alchemical works. So did Godwin. On and on and on, yeah. Please. - [Audience Member] Did Mary Shelley ever make it back to the castle after that first time? -[Peter Balestrieri] She did, so later on in life, after the 1831 edition, which is a huge sort of revamping of the 1818 edition, heavily edited, she changes a lot of things, she also writes a great introduction that we have where she tells the whole story of the famous night and everything that happened and how the idea came to her et cetera, et cetera. So time goes by and Mary Shelley's one of those people that likes to revisit places that have been important in her life and so she makes almost the same tour again that she had made with Percy, goes down the Rhine, goes back to Castle Frankenstein, but of course a very different person now, a very different life. - [Donna Hirst] So we have people showing up at the open house so we have to stop. - [Peter Balestrieri] I'm sorry. - [Donna Hirst] I'd like to thank you so much.