Frankenstein Sundae, 358

Return to Castle Frankenstein

Mary Shelley’s death in 1851 was a quiet one, did not create much of a stir. Most of the Frankenstein offspring were yet to be born, and she could not have imagined what a profound and permanent cultural effect her creation would have. In a mercenary way, I think about how she would have profited these days—enormously—from such an accomplishment. Movie rights. Licensing fees. Public appearances. She would not have had to kowtow to Sir Timothy Shelley for years, hoping to extract from him a few occasional quid to help her raise her son, Sir Timothy’s grandson and direct heir.

Others in her circle preceded her or soon followed her to the grave. Her stepbrother, Charles Clairmont, had died about a year before she did. His sister, Claire, would live until 1879, spending her final years in Florence, where she lies today just about six miles southeast of the city in the suburb of Antella; her marker is in the floor of a chapel there (Santa Maria Annunziata). I stood there on April 22, 1999. (Some pix from that day.)

Bysshe’s youthful friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg died on August 21, 1862; Thomas Love Peacock, on January 23, 1866; Edward John Trelawny, 1881; Jane Williams Hogg, 1884. Mary Shelley’s son, Sir Percy Florence, died on December 5, 1889; his wife, Jane, survived nearly ten more years, dying on January 24, 1899. And then they were all gone.

I was born in 1944.

I first heard about Frankenstein in my boyhood. Halloween and all.

I didn’t read the book until January 1985.

I did not start becoming interested in—and then obsessed with—Mary Shelley until the mid-1990s, when, a middle school English teacher, I began having my students write stories featuring Frankenstein’s creature.

My obsession raged for nearly a decade.

I read everything she wrote. Everything her mother wrote. Everything her father wrote. Everything her husband wrote. And many many things about her friends, her circle, her world.

In the spring of 1999 I spent six weeks running around Europe looking at as many Shelley-related sites as I possibly could.

And on that trip, on April 29, 1999, I sat in the little restaurant inside Castle Frankenstein, near Gernsheim, Germany. Miles below, the Rhine twisted along. Back in 1814 Mary Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley, returning by river, virtually penniless, from their elopement from six weeks earlier, stopped there for a few hours while the boatman waited for the full moon to rise. Looming over them—a dozen miles away—were the ruins of Castle Frankenstein, which they could not have seen.

The moon rose. They continued their Rhine journey homeward.

Four years later she would write Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.

One hundred seventy-five years later, I would sit in the restaurant in Castle Frankenstein. I would slurp a luscious sundae. I would think about Mary Shelley. About her book. About her family.

And I would return home to write her story. And mine.

The End