Mary returns to London--and to fame.
Just one more: H. M. Milner’s Frankenstein; or The Man and the Monster! premiered on October 9,
1826, at the Royal Coburg Theatre.[1] It ran for eight performances,
originally, but was often reprised in the ensuing decades.[2] Set in Sicily, at the foot
of Mt. Etna, the play shows the creature coming to life, shows Frankenstein
fleeing in horror at what he’s done—and, later, trying to kill his creation. It
ends with armed peasants chasing the creature into the darkness near the summit
of Etna.
And—as we well know by now—those
peasants were chasing him into what seems to be a limitless future. As I write
these words early in 2016, films about Frankenstein’s creature continue to
appear—I, Frankenstein (2014, with
Aaron Eckhart as the creature) has come and gone, as have a few others. On the
Internet Movie Database (IMDB), the list of film (and TV) titles that include “Frankenstein”
seems endless. Our fascination with the creation of life has never stopped—not in
biologists’ laboratories, not at the local cinema.
Mary Shelley and her son
returned to London on August 25, 1823, and just four days later, Mary and her
father and stepmother went to see Presumption.
We can only imagine her excitement. Practically unknown, she’d left England a
few years before, and now she was sitting in a prominent London theater
watching a staged production of what remains her most celebrated novel.
Unfortunately, there is a gap in
her journal about the time she went to the play: After the entry for June 3,
1823, she has no entries until December 15 of that year. But in a mid-September
letter to Leigh Hunt (a letter she apparently worked on several days), she
tells him that her father and half-brother, William, met her at the wharf, and
that she stayed for a while with the Godwins. And then she tells Hunt about her
trip to the theater:
But
lo & behold! I found myself famous!—Frankenstein had prodigious success as
a drama & was about to be repeated for the 23rd night at the
English opera house [now
the Lyceum]. … I was much amused & it
appeared to excite a breathless eagerness in the audience ….[3]
And there was yet another
surprise: Her father had arranged for the publication of a new edition of Frankenstein, a decision most Shelley
scholars agree was motivated by the various stage versions beginning to appear
on London’s stages. The same thing happens today, of course: When a film based
on a book comes out, that book—even though it may long have been out of print
(from The Hobbit, 1937, to Winter’s Tale, 1983, to The Hunger Games, 2008)—returns to the
shelves of bookstores, to the listings on Amazon. And sales surge.
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