University of Virginia Library

I am grateful to Lord Abinger for his kind permission to publish quotations from the Frankenstein manuscripts and to publish the photographs of two manuscript leaves that accompany this article. The discoveries made in the course of researching this material and writing this article would not have been possible without my previously making a diplomatic transcription of the entire Frankenstein manuscripts from the originals in the Bodleian Library — apparently the first such transcription ever made. I wish to express my thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for a Research Grant which facilitated that work.

My description of the physical aspects of the Frankenstein manuscripts is much indebted to an unpublished report entitled "The Frankenstein Notebooks: Technical Notes, Watermarks and Collations" (23 December 1993) and its significant revision (dated 7 February 1995) by Bruce C. Barker-Benfield, Senior Assistant Librarian at the Bodleian Library's Department of Western Manuscripts. I am also grateful to Dr. Barker-Benfield for the very careful reading he gave a version of this article. In addition, I am much indebted to Charles E. Robinson who also read the same earlier version with a vigilant eye. I consequently modified several of my arguments. Barker-Benfield's report will be incorporated into the Introduction to Robinson's facsimile edition of the Frankenstein manuscripts which is forthcoming from Garland Publishing, Inc.

The fifteen Volume I chapters of the Last Draft correspond to the 1818 Volume One, chapters I — VII, and Volume Two, chapters I — II, as follows:

• Last Draft 1818 Edition
• "Chap. 1" [not extant] Presumably equivalent to the four prefatory letters of the frame narrator Walton
• "Chap. [1 cancelled?] 2" [⅔ extant?] Chap. I: approximately last ⅔, starting at 30.13
• Chap. [2 cancelled] 3 Chap. II: beginning through 40.17 ("as I pleased.")
• Chap. 4 Chap. II: 40.18 ("The next morning") to end
• Chap. 5 Chap. III: beginning through 48.18 ("his nature will allow.")
• Chap. 6 Chap. III: 48.19 ("When I found") to end
• Chap. 71 Chap. IV: beginning to 57.3 ("a long, long time.")
• Chap. 72 Chap. IV: 57.4 ("This was the commencement") to end
• Chap. V: beginning through 62.31 ("leave my chamber.")
• Chap. 8 Chap. V: 62.32 ("One of my first duties") to end
• Chap. 9 Chap. VI: beginning through 70.21 ("I was destined to endure.")
• Chap. 10 Chap. VI: 70.22 ("It was completely dark"; manuscript page 111 begins with the variant "Night had closed ˄in˄") through 75.25 ("an evil result.")
• Chap. 11 Chap. VI: ("We were soon") to end
• Chap. VII: beginning through 80.33 ("Justine was condemned.")
• Chap. 12 Chap. VII: 80.35 ("I cannot pretend" to end (and end of Volume One)
• Chap. 13 Chap. I of Volume Two
• Chap. 14 Chap. II of Volume Two

Draft "Chapter 2" above includes insert material that I label Part A1. Because Chapter 3 above was the original Chapter 2 and the number change was made in different ink, i.e., after the chapter was written, we cannot be sure about the extent of the original "Chapter 1." It may have corresponded to the 1818 Chapter I. In other words, the opening Walton frame material may have been written, or conceived, at the time when the original Chapter 2 was changed to 3 and an original "Chapter 1" was changed to "2." Perhaps the closing frame material was written, or conceived, around the same time. Alternatively an original long "Chapter 1" may have been divided into two chapters, or, as seems to be the case with the two chapters numbered 7, Mary may have accidentally numbered two chapters Chapter 2.

(Last Draft Volume II and the Fair Copy were foliated by Barker-Benfield on 31 January 1995.) Evidence that Mary had the relevant portion of Part A before her (or at least some memory of it) when she was drafting the A1 insert is provided by the following cancelled paragraph fragment in the insert: "When I was about fifteen my f" (f. 2v). This fragment corresponds to this paragraph-opening in Part A: "When I was about [twelve cancelled] ˄fourteen˄ years old we . . ." (p. 43). As it appears in 1818, the Part A paragraph separates Part A1 into two inserts; the 1818 version begins, "When I was about fifteen years old, we . . ." (Rieger 35.3). The cancelled paragraph fragment in A1 appears, in relation to its intervening placement in 1818, a couple of paragraphs prematurely.

The opening two-and-a-fragment Volume II chapters of the Last Draft correspond to the 1818 Volume Two, chapters III and IV, as follows:

• Last Draft 1818 Edition
• Chap. 1 Chap. III: beginning through 102.5 ("the barbarity of man.")
• Chap. 2 Chap. III: 102.6 ("As soon as morning dawned") to end
• Chap. IV: beginning through 106.18 ("at first enigmatic." Or "igmmatic" as Mary wrote on her p. 17, prompting Percy to comment in the margin, "you pretty Pecksie!" with the same pencil that he earlier noted [p. 11]: "This chapter is too short")
• Chap. 3 [fragment] Chap. IV: 106.19 ("A considerable period"; a revision of the manuscript page 17 "It was sometime") through 109.8 ("was that possible,").

For the benefit of the reader who, with Rieger's edition in hand, wishes to have a clearer conception of exactly what material constitutes Part Cr, the following correspondences occur between the manuscript and the 1818 edition of Frankenstein:

As for the evidence that all three bifolia originally came from the same quire, Barker-Benfield notes: "pleats at the inner edges of all these leaves, caused either directly by the sewing-thread or by adjacent crumpling, exactly match each other but not those of the leaves from other quires" (8). The identically placed sewing-holes at the inner edges of these six leaves match the placement of those at the inner edges of the other Continental leaves.

The watermarked date "1806" appears on the leaves paginated 62 — 73, 90 — 102 (101/102 constitutes half of an intact bifolium), 101/102, 101/102 (repeated), 103/104, 121 — 136, 153 — 168, and 183 — 198. The Britannia watermark appears on the following paginated (and in two cases unpaginated) leaves once conjoined with the "1806" leaves: 74 — 89, unnumbered leaf ["103/104"] (the other half of the intact bifolium), unnumbered leaf ["105/106"], 105 — 120, 137 — 152, 169 — 182, 199 — 203/blank verso.

The last thirteen chapters of Volume II of the Last Draft correspond in the 1818 edition to Volume Two, chapters VII — IX, and Volume Three, chapters I — VII, as follows:

• Last Draft 1818 Edition
• No heading [the last ½ of "Ch. 6"?] Chap. VII of Volume Two: beginning through 128.6.
• Chap. 7 Chap. VII: 128.7 to end
• Chap. VIII: beginning through 133.27
• Chap. 8 Chap. VIII: 133.28 to end (there is a cancelled "Chap. 9" heading on manuscript p. 88 of this pp. 79 — 90 chapter)
• Chap. 9 Chap. IX
• Chap. 10 Chap. I of Volume Three
• Chap. [11 deleted] 2 Chap. II: beginning through 161.2
• Chap. 12 Chap. II: 161.2 to end
• Chap. III: beginning through 166.4 (at the point where Chapter III begins, on p. 118 of the Last Draft, Mary penned a self-direction, like the chapter number change above, related to the chapter divisions of the 1818 edition: "Finish Chap. 2 here-")
• Chap. 13 Chap. III: 166.5 to end
• Chap. 14 Chap. IV: beginning through 178.26
• Chap. 15 Chap. IV: 178.27 to end
• Chap. V: beginning through 185.32
• Chap. 16 Chap. V: 185.33 to end
• Chap. 17 Chap. VI
• Chap. 18 Chap. VII

The top half of the posthorn watermark appears on leaves paginated 99 — 100 and 105 — 114; the bottom on leaves paginated 115 — 138. In counting "all told five watermarks" on the Dep. c. 534 leaves, E. B. Murray must have misconstrued these halves of a single watermark as two distinct watermarks. "One of the watermarks" he remarks "looks — deceptively? — like an intertwined 'L.B.'" (50 n1). Deceptively indeed — as I indicate, the letters depending from the bottom half of the oval emblem are in fact "P & S". The watermarked firm name "PHIPPS & SON" appears on leaves 139/140, 143/144, and 153 — 156; the watermarked date "1809" on Mary's leaf 167/168 and on Percy's leaves 175 — 186A; and the watermarked date "1814" appears on Percy's last leaf, 187/blank verso.

The five gaps (lost leaves 6 — 7 of the first putative notebook [the opening leaves 1 — 4 of which are also missing] and lost leaves 2, 4 — 7, 10 — 14, and 16 — 18 of the second) are as follows: pp. 101 — 104 (Rieger 186.16 ["into my heart"] — 187.30); pp. 141 — 142 (Rieger 202.15 ["ioned by heaven"] — 203.9 ["was in these"]); pp. 145 — 152 (Rieger 203.34 ["of the inhabitants"] — 206.28); pp. 157 — 166 (Rieger 208.15 ["ension. His"] — 212.11 ["You were"]); and pp. 169 — 174 (Rieger 213.9 ["he was sunk"] — 215.16 ["But the con"]).

Mary's journal entry "Finish transcribing" on 13 May 1817 (I: 169) might be taken (if read as Mary speaking for herself alone, and not, as here seems most probable, for herself and Percy) as evidence that she had finished a transcription of the Last Draft additional to the surviving Fair Copy which Percy concluded. Were there, then, two fair copies, or a fair copy segment which duplicated all of Percy's segment of the extant Fair Copy? It seems much more likely that the portion of the surviving Fair Copy in Mary's hand which duplicates Percy's (my Part DPM) is the remnant of a sequence which was intended to replace the carelessly scissored concluding pages (resulting in mutilated text), and that it came to include Percy's last page which was not affected by careless scissoring. Does Mary's "Finish transcribing" apply, then, to her finishing those duplicate pages? Probably not if one understands an ambiguous and apparently anomalous journal entry five months after the one just quoted and over two months before the publication of Frankenstein, as applying to that work. The entry for 15 (an error for 23) October 1817 includes the notation (confirmed by an examination of the actual journal in the Bodleian) "[write cancelled] translate F" (I: 182). "F" is Mary's frequent abbreviation for Frankenstein and "translate" might best be interpreted, especially in the context of the preceding, presumably less precise, cancelled word, as "transfer." It seems reasonable to conclude, then, that the duplicate pages (which I am assuming the printer used rather than Percy's impaired Fair Copy pages) were created by an act of transference from one transcription to another on 23 October 1817.

James Rieger's ingenious argument that Mary's inspirational vision followed "a conversation about principles" which John Polidori, Byron's physician, records as taking place between himself and Byron on 15 June 1816 (Diary 123), and which thus possibly predated Byron's proposal of a ghost-story compact, has been undermined by several critics (see Walling 30, Joseph 225 — 226, Ketterer 79 — 80, Clubbe 102 — 106, Sunstein 429 n16).

See the third part of Mary Shelley (with Percy Shelley), History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817). Clubbe argues for 20 or 21 June 1816 as the starting date of Frankenstein. The strongest evidence that Mary's waking vision occurred before 22 June is provided by her letter of 10 November 1824 to John Cam Hobhouse regarding details in the proofs of Hobhouse's pamphlet "Exposure of the Mis-statements Contained in Captain Medwin's Pretended 'Conversations of Lord Byron'" (published in 1825): "the Preface to Frankenstein [by Percy Shelley] proves [it, in fact, does not; this letter, and Mary's 1831 Introduction, must suffice] that that story was conceived before Lord Byron's and Shelley's tour round the lake . . ." (Letters I: 455). If Clubbe and I are correct, Polidori's diary entry for 17 June 1816 — "The ghost-stories are begun by all but me" (Diary 125) — either does not take account of Mary Shelley's similar situation or it implies a story that she abandoned (the same alternatives would also apply to Percy Shelley).

Emily Sunstein suggests that "Justine was created as a tribute to Fanny" Imlay (430 n33).

Mary's art teacher was "Possibly John West (1772 — 1833), miniature painter and drawing master, who lived in Bath from at least 1795 to 1833" (Letters I: 23 n3).

If the statement "write Preface" is not a mistake for "writes Preface," it could be understood as either "I write the Preface" or "Shelley and I write the Preface" — in which case Mary's statement in her 1831 Introduction that "As far as I can recollect, it was entirely written by him" (Rieger 229) is misleading. See Hunt 148.

Account should also be taken of the references to "work" in Mary's journal during the period of Frankenstein's creation. The term would seem to cover "literary work," no doubt including work on Frankenstein. The "work" dates (with the "work" and "write" days asterisked) are as follows: 11, 13, 14, 16*, 18, 26, 28 September; 8, 10, 11, 12, 15, 19*, 22* October; 2*, 5, 12, 13, 14, 15*, 17, 18*, 19, 24*, 27* November; 2*, 6*, 7*, 9* December 1816; and 4*, 7*, 8*, 10*, 11, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23 January 1817 (Journals I: 135 — 137, 139 — 140, 142, 144 — 149, 153 — 155).

No doubt because the point is so obvious, it seems not to have been made in print until 1979; see Ketterer 41.

The five letters from Charles Clairmont that Jane, Lady Shelley, includes in Volume I of the four-volume Shelley and Mary (1822), her intermixture of letters and Mary's journals, give a good impression of his amiable character and suggest a number of connections with Frankenstein. Clerval and Frankenstein's time in Oxford seems to have been anticipated by a trip that Charles Clairmont made with Percy, Mary, and Thomas Love Peacock. In a letter to his sister Jane dated 16 September 1815 at Percy and Mary's house in Bishopgate, Charles writes: "We visited the very rooms where the two noted infidels, Shelley and Hogg (now, happily excluded the society of the present residents), pored, with the incessant and unwearied application of the alchymist, over the certified and natural boundaries of human knowledge" (Shelley and Mary I: 85). The passionate regard for nature that Clerval is described as exhibiting in the latter part of Chapter I of Volume Three (cf. Chapter 10 of Volume II of the Last Draft) is the very echo of the regard that Charles Clairmont expresses in four letters that are reproduced from the period he lived in Bagneres de Bigorre, Hautes Pyrénées. In his eloquent lengthy letter to Percy and Mary of 8 August 1816 (Shelley and Mary I: 114 — 127), after referring to a letter received from Mary dated 28 June 1816 (not in the Letters) and his plan to spend time in Spain, Italy, and Germany (specifying Frankfort and Frankenstein's university town, "Ingolstad") to learn the languages (noting his intended focus on Spanish, "a more commercial language" than Italian), he embarks on an extended euphoric description of his mountainous environment. A cavern in a mountain is likened to the jaws of a "monstrous animal" but it is his emotions during a solitary ascent of another mountain (following the exhaustion of his American friend Lovell) which most explicitly parallel elements in Frankenstein: "I am convinced that the first idea of a heaven was occasioned by the sensations experienced while on the top of some mountain, while alienated from everything but nature in its veriest wildness . . . . I spent perhaps the three most delightful hours of my life in this situation" (Shelley and Mary I: 125). Looking up at another cloudless blue sky, Clerval "felt as if he had been transported to fairy land" (Vol. II, p. 104; cf. Rieger 153.2 — 3). Charles' letter concludes with an account of his experience of nature's power to induce the recollection, often melancholy, of past happy times. The first of three paragraphs, not in the Last Draft, which provide a hindsight eulogy for the soon-to-be-deceased Clerval ends with a quotation from Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," the work of a poet who best epitomizes Charles Clairmont's and Henry Clerval's sensibility. In his letter to Percy dated 26 January 1817, Charles declares: "I should choose beyond everything else in the world the life of Wordsworth . . ." (Shelley and Mary I: 188). This third letter from Bagneres was preceded by another lengthy one (albeit incomplete) dated 18 November 1816 in which he suggests that Percy and Mary come to Bagneres: "you might live another Julie and another Wolmar [from Rousseau's Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, 1761]" (Shelley and Mary I: 160 — 161). Charles Clairmont's final reproduced letter from Bagneres, dated 9 August 1817 and addressed to Mary, includes the following: "You say nothing more of your Novel. Do not neglect it on my account, and send me one of the first copies" (Shelley and Mary I: 215). To compensate for the addition of the three paragraph, reader-response-priming encomium to Clerval, and to avoid dwelling on anticlimactic scenery, a paragraph in the Last Draft describing the plains of Holland (II: 106 — 107) is reduced in the 1818 text to one sentence (Rieger 154.26 — 28). A version of the last half of that paragraph (about the problems for passing carriages posed by narrow roads between canals) appears in History of a Six Weeks' Tour (Shelley, Mary, with Percy, 76 — 77).

I do not believe that much can be made of the two instances of the name "Carignan." There are no references to any Carignans in Mary Shelley's letters or journals and indeed no Carignans in what is known of her biography, but Carignan is a relatively common French name. Its derivation (from the gallo-roman "Carenus" plus the suffix "anum") is obscure until 1662 when Maurice, Count of Soissons, of the Carignana (Piémont) branch of the House of Savoie, became Prince of Carignan (see Rostaing). Carignan is also the name of a village in the Ardennes near Spain. In fact, both Carignan and Clerval are French place names. (Clerval is about ninety miles north of Geneva.) Is it possible then that Mary simply randomly alighted on the place name Carignan for a character, perhaps by way of association because of its similarity to Caroline, the first name of Frankenstein's mother? Caroline Beaufort (also surnamed for a French place name?) is introduced just seven paragraphs before Clerval in the 1818 edition. Did Mary then substitute the place name Clerval (with its surely inevitable association in her mind with Clairmont) in order to obliterate the Caroline/Carignan echo? And are the subsequent vacillations in Part D between Clairval and Clerval simply confused indications of the parallels in Mary's mind between the names Clerval and Clairmont, confused indications augmented by further French place names such as Clermont, Clermont-en-Argonne, Clermont-Ferand, Clermont-Hérault, and Clairvaux? Certainly speculation along these lines could account for the peculiar order Carignan, Clerval, and Clairval. Finally, allowance should also be made for the influence of the name "Clermont" as in Mary Anne Clermont, Lady Byron's governor and confident. Lord Byron blamed Mary Anne Clermont for the destruction of his marriage.

The description of this situation in the Last Draft includes a couple of details which were subsequently altered. Mary's original idea that the monster would hide in "the tool house" (p. 8; originally at Rieger 101.14) adjoining the De Lacey cottage was deleted and converted into a hut. Since there are several references to Felix carrying tools or fetching tools (p. 11 [Rieger 103.10], p. 13 [Rieger 104.28], p. 18 [Rieger 107.6]), the monster would have been quickly discovered in Mary's first location. As for the other detail, at one point the monster says of Felix that "the youth mounted on a large strange animal [road cancelled] rode away" (p. 15). The corresponding portion of the 1818 text reads: "the youth departed after the first meal" (Rieger 105.23). Either Mary or Percy subsequently realized that the possession of a horse would conflict with the De Lacey's state of "poverty" (p. 17; Rieger 106.20).

The fifth "Maimouna cancelled] ˄Safie˄" instance follows Felix's only and (given the sense in the later written material that Felix and Safie are not yet married) perhaps premature reference to Safie as "My wife" (p. 80; Shelley 134.16; unchanged in the 1831 edition). Alternatively, this "mistake" may relate to a draft of the Felix/Safie material that is now lost.

Not to be included among the significant name variants, it might be noted that, in Part D of the Last Draft, Mary misspells the name of Walton's sister (the person to whom his four letters, his transcription of Frankenstein's narrative, and Walton's journalstyle "continuation" [Rieger 206.9] are addressed). Mary consistently uses the form "Margeret" (p. 184, cf. Rieger 206.31; p. 189, cf. Rieger 210.15; p. 190 ["my dear Margeret" omitted at Rieger 211.7]; and p. 196, cf. Rieger 216.4). In the first and last instances the error is corrected, the "e" has been amended into an "a." The same misspelling crops up in Mary's Part DM of the Fair Copy (p. 153; cf. Rieger 206.31); Percy in his Part DP writes the correct form "Margaret" (p. 176; Rieger 216.4).

Arithmetical calculations, generally in the margin and mainly in Volume I of the Last Draft, could be references to preliminary rough draft segments (from which Mary was working while writing the surviving Last Draft), segments which were each page numbered separately. Thus, on page 81 of Volume I, the numbers "104," "52," and "24" are added up to make a total of "180." On page 102 of the same volume, at the end of Chapter 8, the number "20" appears, and below it the number "15." On page 137 of the same volume, at the end of Chapter 12, "37" is added to "20" to make a total of "57." On page 152, also of Volume I, "126" appears to be amended to "120" and "130" to "136," before both numbers were deleted. All the above calculations appear to be in Percy's hand. The most teasing calculations, because the most detailed, appear on page 62 of Volume II, the first surviving page of the British notebook in which Part D was written. There are two sets of calculations, both in the margin. The more interesting of these appears to be in Mary's hand: "66" altered to "62" is subtracted from "98" leaving "36"; a second "36" is added to this result making a total of "72"; "97" is then added to that total making an overall total of "169." Since these calculations appear, after the page was written on, on page 62 (with the "2" blotted so that it looks like a "6" or blotted while being altered to a "6") and since the first two lines of that page — a continuation of previous material — have been deleted and that previous material is now lost because no previous leaves continuous with Part D (whether or not of the same English paper) have survived, it might be hypothesized that the "62" as amended refers to 62 pages which have been cancelled (i.e., the previous 61 pages plus the two lines at the head of page 62). It might further be hypothesized that, at a point of drafting around page 98 of Volume II (which is the beginning of the substantially revised Chapter 10, the chapter where Percy suggested a significant change regarding Frankenstein's trip to England), the decision to eliminate those 62 pages was made. Consequently, "62" is subtracted from "98," and the numbers added (relating to preliminary rough drafts?) are an attempt to calculate the new approximate length of Volume II of the Last Draft once the pages beyond 98 have been written. Above these calculations are another set of calculations which are in Percy's hand and which include the total "191." This might be a similar attempt to calculate the number of pages of the yet-to-be-redrafted Volume I. The calculations include the number "36," possibly related to the "36" that resulted from the subtraction in Mary's calculations. An alternative and perhaps more compelling possibility would be to relate the three totals — "180," "169," and "191" — to the page totals of the three Fair Copy volumes, or to those of the three published 1818 volumes. The proportional differences between the figures as here ordered are close to the proportional differences between the page totals of the 1818 volumes: 181, 156, and 192. The discrepancy between "169" and the 156 pages of Volume Two could be accounted for by supposing that some portion of the apparently missing thirty-six pages between the end of Part B of the Last Draft and the beginning of Part C was cut (with the result that the corresponding published text is much shorter). As for the corresponding page totals of the three Fair Copy volumes, the only one we know about — the 187 pages of Volume Three — is close to Percy's "191" total. It should further be noted that page 137 of Volume I of the Last Draft (see the first paragraph of this footnote) became the final page of Volume One of the 1818 edition, and that page 98 of Volume II (see the second paragraph of this footnote) became the first page of Volume Three.

Mary notes reading Locke on the following dates: 18 — 27, 29, and 30 November; 1 — 3, 5, 10, 12, 13, and 16 — 31 December 1816 (the last being a synoptic entry); and 6 and 8 January 1817. This could imply that the Last Draft version of the monster's narrative — [B — C], [C], and Cr — was written, and re-written in the case of Cr, between the end of November 1816 and 10 January 1817 (after which date Mary does not appear to have engaged in any further writing of her novel for well over two months). In one of the gaps in her reading of Locke — 6 — 9 December 1816 — Mary read her mother's A Vindication of the Rights of Women. This could well be related to her writing or rewriting Safie's story and the story of Safie's mother (a likely portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft) in Cr sometime between 6 December 1816 and 10 January 1817.

My dating of the Part D material depends, of course, on the assumption that, since it was written in a notebook containing British paper, that paper was obtained following the return to England. That assumption may be incorrect. While on the Continent, Mary may already have possessed, or at some point acquired, that notebook. If that were the case, the nine "translate" entries in her journal for the periods 7 — 12, 14 — 16 August 1816 assume unusual interest (Journals I: 123 — 126). If she is referring to a job of translating an extended piece from one language to another, it is strange that she gives no title (something she normally does in such circumstances). Is this then another instance, like her entry for 15 (actually 23) October 1817 (see footnote 11 above), where "translate" may mean "transfer"? If so, 7 — 16 August 1816 may well be the period when Mary began transferring rough draft material into Last Draft material, whether onto British notebook paper — the last portion of which survives as Part D — or onto paper now lost. It should be noted that there are references to Mary writing during this period (presumably a, or the, rough draft of Frankenstein) on 7, 9, 12, and 16 August. The entries for 9 August and 12 August link the acts of writing and "translating": "Write and translate"; "Write my story and translate" (Journals I: 123, 124). The two activities could, then, be understood as both applying to Frankenstein. If this were the case, it must be assumed that, at least over certain periods, the writing of rough draft material and the "translation" involved in writing the Last Draft were proceeding more or less concurrently. In terms of attempts to establish a chronology of composition, the conclusion would seem to be that cogent arguments can be made for Mary's beginning the Last Draft either on 7 August 1816 or on some finally unprovable date after her return to England one month later.

Parallels between descriptive details in Mary's journal or letters and the Last Draft of Frankenstein cannot be used to conclusively date the writing of any portion of that draft but one parallel between a journal entry and a detail in Part D of the draft is at least consistent with an early completion date for that portion of Part D. In her journal entry for 26 July 1816 Mary observes that "in the autumn" the men of the Chamounix region "hunt the Chamois — an occupation they delight in — they think themselves lucky if they kill three in the season which they are glad to sell for 4 or 5 [louis cancelled] francs — and if they cannot they eat it themselves — " (Journals I: 120). In Part D of the Last Draft, Frankenstein speculates that if the monster "has indeed taken refuge in the alps he may be hunted like the chamois & destroyed as a beast of prey" (p. 171; Rieger 197.31 — 32).

While evidence of last stage patching is most apparent in Part Cr, there is one Part D "patch" that is datable to April 1817. An insert slip once pinned on page 98 (corresponding to Shelley 147.5 ["I found"] — 147.12 ["tranquillity."]) is written on the recto of the lower part of the address leaf of a letter from William Godwin to Mary Shelley which is postmarked "9[?] [A]P.[rill] [1]817" (see Barker-Benfield 13). This Volume II, Chapter 10 insert anticipates Frankenstein's journey to England to "compose a female" (added slip; Rieger 147.5) and is related to the same Chapter 10 revision material (written some months earlier?) which was prompted by Percy's suggestion that Frankenstein propose the trip. It is possible that the insert passage on the address leaf slip, composed between 10 — 17 April, when Mary was correcting Frankenstein, was the last sustained new passage that Mary added to her manuscript.

In an insightful article Joyce Zonana provides the other side — the feminist side — of the Oriental issue in Frankenstein. She argues that, with the story of Safie and her mother, Mary Shelley appropriated Mary Wollstonecraft's negative example, in A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), of the way in which the followers of Muhammad abused women. In other words, Mary subscribed to her mother's prejudicial conception of Oriental otherness. It should be stressed, however, that the dynamic operating throughout Frankenstein, also applies here: the Other becomes the Self.

Robert Southey's orientalist epic poems Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810) have recently been proposed as additional sources of Frankenstein. See Majeed 73 — 75. Both of Southey's titles figure in Mary's and Percy's reading for 1814 (Journals I: 85; see also I: 28, 29, and I: 26 — 27). Charles Robinson notes the existence in the Abinger Deposit of what may be an oriental work by Mary Shelley, "an unfinished manuscript, entitled 'The Caravanserail; or, A Collection of Eastern Stories,' consisting of an introductory frame and 'Tale I — Abdelazi; or, The New Sleeper awakened.' This fair-copy manuscript appears to be a transcription by someone other than Mary Shelley, and it is therefore impossible, without other evidence, to determine if she was the author" (Shelley Tales, xix n12).

According to Donald Reiman, work on Laon and Cythna began in March 1817 when the Shelleys took up residence in Albion House in Marlow.

Leonard Wolf notes the "hint at a fear of incest" (75 n4) in Frankenstein's dream of Elizabeth: "Delighted and surprised, I embraced her; but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel" (Rieger 53.10 — 15; essentially unchanged in the 1831 edition). Wolf goes on to quote Laon's similarly "grisly dream" (76 n4):

Nigel Leask observes that "The question of incest which so fascinated Shelley is really another version of his favorite theme of discovering the Same in the Other, which I have linked on an existential level with Rousseau and on an ideological/philosophical level with [The Ruins of Empire by Constantin] Volney" (131). This statement occurs in the context of Leask's illuminating account of percy Shelley's orientalist attitudes in The Revolt of Islam: their displacement of his faith in the civilizing influence of British imperialism in India; their debts to Tom Moore's account of an oriental revolution in Lalla Rookh (1817), to Volney's Les Ruines, ou méditations sur les révolutions des empires (1791; English translation, 1792), and to Sydney Owenson's (Lady Morgan's) The Missionary (1811); and their problematic feminism (108 — 118, 130 — 134). Lalla Rookh and The Missionary figure in Mary's reading list for 1817 (Journals I: 100). Volney's Ruins is not to be found in any of Mary's readings lists but she must have read it given its prominence in Frankenstein. (Felix chooses Volney's Ruins to teach Safie French "because the declamatory style was framed in imitation of the eastern authors" [Rieger 114.27 — 28].) Leask also discusses Robert Southey's The Curse of Kehenna as a source for The Revolt of Islam (95 — 98; see footnote 30 above for the same argument regarding Frankenstein).

Walton's quest for the North Pole co-exists with — or may be subsumed by — his quest for the fabled Northeast Passage to the North Pacific Ocean and India. See Lew 257.

In Robert Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer (see footnote 30 above) a character named Maimuna is a comely old woman who turns out to be a sorceress (I am indebted to Kara K. Eadie for this possible name source). Southey may well have here appropriated the name of Muhammad's thirteenth wife; he projected writing in collaboration with Coleridge an eight-book epic poem on the life of Muhammad (although he only completed the famous miracle of the cave and the spider episode).

Kara K. Eadie drew my attention to the relevance of the "fair enemy" characterization of Safiyyah.

References to Mary as the moon and Percy as the sun recur in their letters and in Percy's poetry, most notably "To the Moon" (1820) and stanza 15 of Epipschidion (1821). Moon in Eclipse is the poetically appropriate title of Jane Dunn's biography of Mary Shelley.