Did Mary Shelley create her monster on the banks of the Tay?
Frankenstein’s roots may not lie in a sodden summer in a Swiss villa but in a Scottish city By Emma Cowing
ON a summer’s day in 1812, a young English girl arrived in Dundee. Weakened after six days travel and only 14 years old, Mary Godwin was pale, sickly and anxious, cast adrift from her family for the first time.
That she had made it all the way from London in one piece was itself a miracle. The journey was slow and treacherous, the country unstable: only months earlier, the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, had been shot.
Yet the young woman’s time in the city proved crucial not just for Mary herself, but for literature. It was here that she immersed herself in politics, ghost stories and nature; and, as a result, gave birth to a monster.
It still comes as a surprise to even the most ardent fans of English literature that Mary Shelley spent two years living in Dundee prior to penning Frankenstein, the gothic horror novel published 200 years ago. Her sojourn there has been largely airbrushed out of history in favour of the romanticism of her fiery relationship with and marriage to poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and their European jaunts with his friend and fellow poet Lord Byron.
But it was Dundee that turned Mary from a directionless teenager into a passionate and somewhat ghoulish author. From the sealed-up plague pits just a stone’s throw from where she lived to the dense woodland that once surrounded the city, everywhere she went she found creative fodder that would one day fill the pages of one of the most famous novels of the 19th century.
Far from the shores of Lake Geneva, where she famously wrote Frankenstein while staying with Shelley and Byron in the sodden summer of 1816, it was by the banks of the Tay where Mary first found inspiration for the monster.
‘Blank and dreary on retrospection I call them; they were not so to me then,’ she wrote of the Tay’s banks in the foreword to the second edition of Frankenstein, published in 1831. ‘They were the eyry of freedom, and the pleasant region where unheeded I could commune with the creatures of my fancy. I wrote then – but in a most common-place style. It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions of the airy flights of my imagination were born and fostered.’
DANIEL Cook, senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Dundee, says: ‘Mary Shelley’s presence here is something of an untold story. It’s a huge part of local history and something the city ought to do more with. She ticks all the boxes. She’s a really important writer, she was a teenager when she was here, learning about the world, and she was and remains hugely influential in science fiction.’
Today, a small and rather dilapidated plaque on a faceless building on South Baffin Street, near the Tay, marks the spot where Mary spent almost two years of her life. The area has changed enormously since her time, when she lived with a jute merchant family named the Baxters. The railway line that now blocks the view towards the Tay had not yet been built. She lived in The Cottage on Ferry Road, which had originally been built as the Countess of Strathmore’s dower house.
Mystery surrounds the true reason for her exile to Dundee at such a young age. Her mother, writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, had died giving birth to Mary and her father, writer William Godwin, had remarried. The new Mrs Godwin was not, apparently, particularly fond of her stepdaughter and wanted her out of the way. In turn, Mary was wracked with teenage guilt over the untimely death of her mother.
She was also in poor health and had suffered from stress and anxiety at a young age. Her father felt living in a small city surrounded by the countryside and breathing sea air would be good for her.
William Thomas Baxter, a friend of Mary’s father who was a political radical and supported the French Revolution, agreed to give the young Mary lodgings. Her first visit to Dundee lasted five months, during which she became close to Baxter’s daughter Isabel. The pair spent much of their time wandering the city streets and the nearby countryside.
Mr Cook says: ‘Back then, the area around Dundee was full of forests and countryside. The docks were right beside the house, so it would have been bustling and exciting.
‘The Tay can be gloomy and foggy and it feels inherently gothic. It’s that mix of the dark river, the fairytale woodland and the friendship with Isabel Baxter that became a heady combination for Mary.’
Miss Baxter was a huge fan of ghost stories and the pair would read them together, scaring themselves out of their wits. The creepy tales introduced Mary to a strange new world.
‘It was a formative influence,’ says Cook. ‘Traditionally, we think of the origins of Frankenstein as coming from Switzerland and the ghost-writing competition she had with Byron and Shelley. But the prior friendship with Isabel, telling these ghost stories to each other in this gothic setting, is quite a compelling one.’
As well as the nearby medieval plague pits, the Baxters’ home was close to where witches had been burned at the stake not much more than a century earlier. For a bright and traumatised teenager still grieving the death of a mother she never knew, it is perhaps understandable why her mind turned to thoughts of horrifying man-made monsters.
Mary left for London five months later – and straight into a scandal. At a welcome home party held by her father, she met young and dashing Percy Bysshe Shelley. She was just 15, while he was 20 and already married to his first wife Harriet Westbrook.
It was this fateful encounter that prompted Mary’s father to send her back to Dundee.
Mr Cook says: ‘Percy had ingratiated himself with William Godwin and wanted to know Mary quite early on. Some people wonder if that was a motive for sending her up to Dundee the second time, given that Percy was married to someone else. Her second visit might well have been to avoid a lot of scandal that might have persisted had she stayed in London.’
MARY spent another ten months in Dundee. Shelley wrote to her constantly as she sat brooding by the Tay – as well as venturing further afield.
‘She certainly had a look around Scotland,’ says Mr Cook. ‘Not just Dundee, but she talks about Edinburgh, going over the Tay to Newburgh, Fife, and to Dunkeld – which is in one of her lesser known novels, The Last Man, and which she describes in a lot of geographic detail. She probably knew Scotland quite well, better than people would have thought.’
One place she did not visit, however, was Orkney. Curiously, it is the one part of the Scotland that actually features in her famous novel, when Victor Frankenstein travels all the way to a remote island in order to create a bride as a companion for the monster.
When Mary returned to London in 1814 she was a young woman, full of dark and gothic thoughts and ready for a romance with Shelley. The pair travelled to Switzerland two years later, where Mary wrote her novel, and were married in December 1816. When Frankenstein was published in 1818 she became a literary phenomenon, whom some credit with creating modern science fiction.
In recent years, Dundee has done its best to promote Mary’s connection to the city. In 2015, a festival explored her ties to Dundee, as part of which Angusbased Poorboy Theatre Company co-produced a play, Monstrous Bodies, which explored her Dundee experience alongside a more contemporary story.
Writer and director Sandy Thomson said at the time: ‘A lot of the time she’s not considered interesting or significant until she ran away with Shelley, but that’s wrong.
‘This quietly imaginative girl with no mother arrives at the home of the Baxters, who are the bedrock of Dundee civic life, and all the while she’s going through these changes.’
Mr Cook says there have been discussions about a Mary Shelley statue, or a plaque as part of the new Discovery Walk being constructed as part of Dundee’s waterfront regeneration.
But he does feel something slightly less reverent might be in order. ‘What I’d really love is for there to be a Mary Shelley Wetherspoons – or perhaps a chain of bookstores in her name.’