In these revolutionary times

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Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) was a proto-feminist philosopher,

novelist and historian of the French revolution.

Mary Wollstonecraft (27 April 1759 – 10 September 1797) was an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher, feminist, and advocate of women’s rights. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children’s book.

A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) is a political pamphlet, written by Mary Wollstonecraft, which attacks aristocracy and advocates republicanism. It was written against the backdrop of the French Revolution and the debates that it provoked in Britain.

In a lively and sometimes vicious pamphlet war, now referred to as the Revolution Controversy, which lasted from 1789 until the end of 1795, British political commentators argued over the validity of monarchy. One scholar has called this debate “perhaps the last real discussion of the fundamentals of politics in [Britain]“.

Wollstonecraft’s was the first response in a pamphlet war sparked by the publication of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), a defense of constitutional monarchy, aristocracy, and the Church of England.

Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason.

The power of popular agitation in revolutionary France, demonstrated in events such as the Tennis Court Oath and the storming of the Bastille in 1789, reinvigorated the British reform movement, which had been largely moribund for a decade. Efforts to reform the British electoral system and to distribute the seats in the House of Commons more equitably were revived.

Much of the vigorous political debate in the 1790s was sparked by the publication of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France in November 1790. Most commentators in Britain expected Burke to support the French revolutionaries, because he had previously been part of the liberal Whig party, a critic of monarchical power, a supporter of the American revolutionaries, and a prosecutor of government malfeasance in India. When he failed to do so, it shocked the populace and angered his friends and supporters.

Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Men was published only weeks after Burke’s Reflections. While Burke supported aristocracy, monarchy, and the Established Church, liberals such as William Godwin, Paine, and Wollstonecraft, argued for republicanism, agrarian socialism, anarchy, and religious toleration.

Most of those who came to be called radicals supported similar aims: individual liberties and civic virtue. They were also united in the same broad criticisms: opposition to the bellicose “landed interest” and its role in government corruption, and opposition to a monarchy and aristocracy who they believed were unlawfully seizing the people’s power.

Burke’s book, despite being priced at an expensive three shillings, sold an astonishing 30,000 copies in two years. Thomas Paine’s famous response, The Rights of Man (1792), which became the rallying cry for thousands, however, greatly surpassed it, selling upwards of 200,000 copies.

Until the late 20th century, Wollstonecraft’s life, which encompassed several unconventional personal relationships, received more attention than her writing. After two ill-fated affairs, with Henry Fuseli and Gilbert Imlay (by whom she had a daughter, Fanny Imlay), Wollstonecraft married the philosopher William Godwin, one of the forefathers of the anarchist movement.

William Godwin (3 March 1756 – 7 April 1836) was an English journalist, political philosopher and novelist. He is considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism, and the first modern proponent of anarchism.

Godwin is most famous for two books that he published within the space of a year: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, an attack on political institutions, and Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, which attacks aristocratic privilege, but also is the first mystery novel. Based on the success of both, Godwin featured prominently in the radical circles of London in the 1790s.

In the ensuing conservative reaction to British radicalism, Godwin was attacked, in part because of his marriage to the pioneering feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797 and his candid biography of her after her death, Memoir (1798), revealing her unorthodox lifestyle, which inadvertently destroyed her reputation for almost a century.

Wollstonecraft died at the age of thirty-eight, ten days after giving birth to her second daughter, leaving behind several unfinished manuscripts. However, with the emergence of the feminist movement at the turn of the twentieth century, Wollstonecraft’s advocacy of women’s equality and critiques of conventional femininity became increasingly important. Today Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and work as important influences.

Their daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, later Mary Shelley, would become an accomplished writer herself. She (30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) became an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 August 1792 – 8 July 1822) was one of the major English Romantic poets and is regarded by critics as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. A radical in his poetry as well as his political and social views, Shelley did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but recognition for his poetry grew steadily following his death.

Shelley was a key member of a close circle of visionary poets and writers that included Lord Byron; Leigh Hunt; Thomas Love Peacock; and his own second wife, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. His close circle of admirers, however, included some progressive thinkers of the day, including his future father-in-law, the philosopher William Godwin.

Shelley is perhaps best known for such classic poems as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, Music, When Soft Voices Die, The Cloud and The Masque of Anarchy, a political poem written in 1819 following the Peterloo Massacre of that year. In his call for freedom, it is perhaps the first modern statement of the principle of nonviolent resistance.

Shelley became an idol of the next three or four generations of poets, including important Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poets such as Robert Browning and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He was admired by Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, W. B. Yeats, Karl Marx, Upton Sinclair and Isadora Duncan. Henry David Thoreau’s civil disobedience was apparently influenced by Shelley’s non-violence in protest and political action.

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, later George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron, FRS (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), commonly known simply as Lord Byron, was an English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement.

Among Byron’s best-known works are the lengthy narrative poems Don Juan and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and the short lyric She Walks in Beauty. He is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains widely read and influential.

Often described as the most flamboyant and notorious of the major Romantics, Byron was celebrated in life for aristocratic excesses, including huge debts, numerous love affairs, rumours of a scandalous incestuous liaison with his half-sister, and self-imposed exile.

Ultimately, Byron resolved to escape the censure of British society (due to allegations of sodomy and incest) by living abroad, thereby freeing himself of the need to conceal his sexual interests.

After this break-up of his domestic life, Byron exiled himself permanently from England, and, as it turned out, it was forever (until he returned after his death, despite his dying wishes). He passed through Belgium and continued up the Rhine River.

In the summer of 1816 he settled at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva, Switzerland, with his personal physician, the young, brilliant, and handsome John William Polidori (7 September 1795 – 24 August 1821), an English writerPolidori, known for his associations with the Romantic movement, and physician.

In Geneve Byron befriended the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Shelley’s future wife Mary Shelley. He was also joined by Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont, with whom he had had an affair in London.

Clara Allegra Byron (12 January 1817 – 20 April 1822), initially named Alba, meaning “dawn,” or “white,” by her mother, was the illegitimate daughter of Lord Byron and Claire Clairmont. Born in Bath, England, she initially lived with her mother and Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley, but was turned over to Byron when she was fifteen months old.

Allegra lived most of her short life with boarders chosen by Byron or in a Roman Catholic convent, where she died at age five of typhus or malaria. She was visited only intermittently by her father, who displayed inconsistent paternal interest in her.

One evening, after a collective reading of ghost stories, Byron suggested that each member of the party write a story of their own. Mary, Percy, Lord Byron, and John Polidori decided to have a competition to see who could write the best horror story.

Two tales that changed the face of Gothic fiction were inspired by this challenge, the story about Frankenstein and the story about Dracula. Mary Shelley began Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, while Byron wrote a fragment about a nobleman named Augustus Darvell who contrives to return from the dead, known as Fragment of a Novel (1816), also known as “A Fragment” and “The Burial: A Fragment”, an unfinished vampire horror story based on the vampire legends Lord Byron heard while travelling the Balkans.

Mary Shelley maintained that she derived the name “Frankenstein” from a dream-vision. Despite her public claims of originality, the significance of the name has been a source of speculation.

More recently, Radu Florescu, in his book In Search of Frankenstein, argued that Mary and Percy Shelley visited Castle Frankenstein near Darmstadt, on their way to Switzerland, where a notorious alchemist named Konrad Dippel had experimented with human bodies, but that Mary suppressed mentioning this visit, to maintain her public claim of originality.

A recent literary essay by A.J. Day supports Florescu’s position that Mary Shelley knew of, and visited Castle Frankenstein before writing her debut novel. Day includes details of an alleged description of the Frankenstein castle that exists in Mary Shelley’s ‘lost’ journals. According to Jörg Heléne, the ‘lost journals’ as well as Florescu’s claims could not be verified.

Victor Frankenstein is a scientist who, after studying chemical processes and the decay of living beings, gains an insight into the creation of life and gives life to his own creature (often referred to as Frankenstein’s monster, or incorrectly referred to as simply Frankenstein).

A possible interpretation of the name Victor derives from Paradise Lost by John Milton, a great influence on Shelley (a quotation from Paradise Lost is on the opening page of Frankenstein and Shelley even allows the monster himself to read it).

Milton frequently refers to God as “the Victor” in Paradise Lost, and Shelley sees Victor as playing God by creating life. In addition to this, Shelley’s portrayal of the monster owes much to the character of Satan in Paradise Lost; indeed, the monster says, after reading the epic poem, that he empathises with Satan’s role in the story.

Percy Shelley, Mary’s husband, served as a major influence for the character. There are many similarities between Victor and Percy Shelley. Percy had a sister named Elizabeth. Victor had an adopted sister, named Elizabeth.

Victor was a pen name of Percy Shelley’s, as in the collection of poetry he wrote with his sister Elizabeth, Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire. At Eton ha had “experimented with electricity and magnetism as well as with gunpowder and numerous chemical reactions”, and his rooms at Oxford were filled with scientific equipment.

Percy Shelley was the first-born son of a wealthy country squire with strong political connections and a descendant of Sir Bysshe Shelley, 1st Baronet of Castle Goring, and Richard Fitzalan, 10th Earl of Arundel. Victor’s family is one of the most distinguished of that republic and his ancestors were counsellors and syndics.

On 22 February 1815, Mary Shelley delivered a two-month premature baby and the baby died two weeks later. Percy did not care about the condition of this premature infant and left with Claire, Mary’s stepsister, for a lurid affair.

When Victor saw the creature come to life he fled the apartment, though the newborn creature approached him, as a child would a parent. The question of Victor’s responsibility to the creature is one of the main themes of the book.

Part of Frankenstein’s rejection of his creation is the fact that he does not give it a name, which gives it a lack of identity. Instead it is referred to by words such as “monster”, “creature”, “daemon”, “devil”, “fiend”, “wretch” and “it”. When Frankenstein converses with the monster he addresses it as “vile insect”, “abhorred monster”, “fiend”, “wretched devil” and “abhorred devil”.

The creature has often been mistakenly called “Frankenstein”. In 1908 one author said “It is strange to note how well-nigh universally the term “Frankenstein” is misused, even by intelligent people, as describing some hideous monster…”

The Modern Prometheus is the novel’s subtitle (though some modern editions now drop the subtitle, mentioning it only in an introduction). Mary Shelley seemingly titled the book after the conflicted principles of knowledge in the story symbolising Victor as the Modern Prometheus.

The group talked about Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment ideas as well. Shelley believed the Enlightenment idea that society could progress and grow if political leaders used their powers responsibly; however, she also believed the Romantic ideal that misused power could destroy society.

While many subsequent film adaptations (notably the 1931 movie Frankenstein and the Hammer Films series starring Peter Cushing) have portrayed Frankenstein as the prototypical “mad scientist”, the novel portrayed him as a tragic figure.

Obsession plays a major role in the development of Victor’s character. First, as a child, he is obsessed with reading books on alchemy, astrology, and many pseudo-sciences. Later, as an adolescent/young adult, he becomes enthralled with the study of actual sciences – mainly dealing with death and the reanimation of corpses.

Finally, after the monster is created, Victor is consumed with guilt, despair, and regret, leading him to obsess over the nature of his creation. Obsessive behaviors can be seen from the beginning of the book until Victor dies.

Prometheus, in later versions of Greek mythology, was the Titan who created mankind at the behest of Zeus. He made a being in the image of the gods that could have a spirit breathed into it. Prometheus taught man to hunt, read, and heal their sick.

Speaking to Victor Frankenstein, the monster refers to himself as “the Adam of your labors”, and elsewhere as someone who “would have” been “your Adam”, but is instead “your fallen angel.”

After Prometheus tricked Zeus into accepting poor-quality offerings from humans, Zeus kept fire from mankind. Prometheus being the creator, took back the fire from Zeus to give to man. When Zeus discovered this, he sentenced Prometheus to be eternally punished by fixing him to a rock of Caucasus, where each day an eagle would peck out his liver, only for the liver to regrow the next day because of his immortality as a god. He was intended to suffer alone for eternity, but eventually Heracles (Hercules) released him.

Prometheus was also a myth told in Latin but was a very different story. In this version Prometheus makes man from clay and water, again a very relevant theme to Frankenstein, as Victor rebels against the laws of nature (how life is naturally made) and as a result is punished by his creation.

Prometheus, a Greek Titan who sculpted man from clay and then stole the light of fire from the gods to give to man, these acts can be attributed to the enabling of civilisation and the gift of knowledge man acquired from him.

Zeus punished Prometheus; bound to stone while an eagle each day would eat away Prometheus’s liver. Suffering this agonising torment Prometheus would face his punishment for eternity.

“Prometheus became a figure who represented human striving, particularly the quest for scientific knowledge, and the risk of overreaching or unintended consequences. In particular, he was regarded in the Romantic era as embodying the lone genius whose efforts to improve human existence could also result in tragedy: Mary Shelley, for instance, gave The Modern Prometheus as the subtitle to her novel Frankenstein.”

The Titan in the Greek mythology of Prometheus parallels Victor Frankenstein. Victor’s work by creating man by new means reflects the same innovative work of the Titan in creating humans.

Some have claimed that for Mary Shelley, Prometheus was not a hero but rather something of a devil, whom she blamed for bringing fire to man and thereby seducing the human race to the vice of eating meat (fire brought cooking which brought hunting and killing).

Byron was particularly attached to the play Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, and Percy Shelley would soon write his own Prometheus Unbound (1820). The term “Modern Prometheus” was actually coined by Immanuel Kant, referring to Benjamin Franklin and his then recent experiments with electricity.

The main character in Fragment of a Novel was Augustus Darvell. The story is written in an epistolary form with the narrator recounting the events that had occurred in a letter. The narrator embarks on a journey or “Grand Tour” to the East with an elderly man, Augustus Darvell.

During the journey, Darvell becomes physically weaker, “daily more enfeebled”. They both arrive at a Turkish cemetery between Smyrna and Ephesus near the columns of Diana. Near death, Darvell reaches a pact with the narrator not to reveal his impending death to anyone. A stork appears in the cemetery with a snake in its mouth. After Darvell dies, the narrator is shocked to see that his face turns black and his body rapidly decomposes:

“I was shocked with the sudden certainty which could not be mistaken — his countenance in a few minutes became nearly black. I should have attributed so rapid a change to poison, had I not been aware that he had no opportunity of receiving it unperceived.”

Darvell is buried in the Turkish cemetery by the narrator. The narrator’s reaction was stoical: “I was tearless.” According to John Polidori, Byron intended to have Darvell reappear, alive again, as a vampire, but did not finish the story. Polidori’s account of Byron’s story indicates it “depended for interest upon the circumstances of two friends leaving England, and one dying in Greece, the other finding him alive upon his return, and making love to his sister.”

Shelley had travelled in the region of Geneva, where much of the story takes place, and the topics of galvanism and other similar occult ideas were themes of conversation among her companions, particularly her future husband, Percy Shelley. After thinking for weeks about what her possible storyline could be, Shelley dreamt about a scientist who created life and was horrified by what he had made. She then wrote Frankenstein. Many aspects of Byron’s personality are said to have inspired aspects of “the creature”. Byron had a club foot which cause him to walk with an awkward and shambling gait.

Later that year, Polidori used his employer’s unfinished work as the basis of a novella: Lord Ruthven, who bears an intentional resemblance to the notorious Lord Byron, and was modelled on Byron himself, is a jaded, charismatic nobleman who must feed upon the blood of the living in order to continue his unnatural existence.

Polidori’s creation, ”The Vampyre”, one of the first vampire stories in English, became the prototype for most subsequent literary vampires, ranging from Count Dracula to Lestat. Polidori has since been credited by some as the creator of the vampire genre of fantasy fiction. The work is described by Christopher Frayling as “the first story successfully to fuse the disparate elements of vampirism into a coherent literary genre.”

Although originally and erroneously accredited to Lord Byron, both Byron and Polidori affirmed that the story is Polidori’s, but there is little doubt that the success of Polidori’s story was due to the fact that most people believed it had been written by his employer; even Goethe considered it Byron’s best work.

Manfred is a dramatic poem written in 1816–1817 by Lord Byron. It contains supernatural elements, in keeping with the popularity of the ghost story in England at the time. It is a typical example of a Romantic closet drama. Manfred shows heavy influence by Goethe’s Faust, which Byron most likely read in translation (although he claimed to have never read it); still, it is by no means a simple copy.

Manfred is a Faustian noble living in the Bernese Alps. Internally tortured by some mysterious guilt, which has to do with the death of his most beloved, Astarte, he uses his mastery of language and spell-casting to summon seven spirits, from whom he seeks forgetfulness. The spirits, who rule the various components of the corporeal world, are unable to control past events and thus cannot grant Manfred’s plea. For some time, fate prevents him from escaping his guilt through suicide.

At the end, Manfred dies defying religious temptations of redemption from sin. Throughout the poem, he succeeds in challenging all authoritative powers he comes across, and chooses death over submitting to spirits of higher powers. Manfred directs his final words to the Abbot, remarking, “Old man! ‘t is not so difficult to die.”

Manfred was written shortly after the failure of Byron’s marriage to Annabelle Millbanke, who most likely accused him of an incestuous relationship with his half-sister Augusta Leigh, while living at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland. Most of Manfred was written on a tour through the Bernese Alps in September 1816. The third act was rewritten in February 1817 since Byron was not happy with its first version.

Byron lived in Italy, spending time in Venice, Rome, Pisa, and Genoa, from 1816 to 1823. He became romantically involved with Contessa Guiccioli, who left her husband for him. Lord Byron continued to publish poetry, focusing much of his attention on a second epic work, Don Juan. He also became interested in the culture of the Armenians he encountered on the Venetian island of Saint Lazarus in 1816, where he acquainted himself with Armenian culture with the help of the abbots belonging to the Mechitarist Order.

With the help of Father H. Avgerian, he learned the Armenian language, and attended many seminars about language and history. He wrote English Grammar and Armenian (Kerakanutyun angğiakan yev hayeren) in 1817, and Armenian Grammar and English (Kerakanutyun hayeren yev angğiakan) in 1819, where he included quotations from classical and modern Armenian.

Intrigued by the language and its efficacy as a spoken tongue, Byron affirmed in his memoirs that “God spoke to the world in Armenian.” Byron also participated in the compilation of the English Armenian dictionary (Barraran angghieren yev hayeren, 1821) and wrote the preface in which he explained the relationship of the Armenians with and the oppression of the Turkish “pashas” and the Persian satraps, and their struggle of liberation. His two main translations are the Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, two chapters of Movses Khorenatsi’s History of Armenia and sections of Nerses of Lambron’s Orations.

His fascination was so great that he even considered a replacement of the Cain story of the Bible with that of the legend of Armenian patriarch Haik. He may be credited with the birth of Armenology and its propagation. His profound lyricism and ideological courage has inspired many Armenian poets, the likes of Ghevond Alishan, Smbat Shahaziz, Hovhannes Tumanyan, Ruben Vorberian and others.

Lord Byron moved to Greece to participate in the fight for independence from the Ottomans in the Greek War of Independence, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero, in 1823. He invested a large amount of his own money in the Greek troops and planned to command part of a military expedition, but became ill before it began. On 19 April 1824, at age 36, Lord Byron died of fever while in Missolonghi in Greece. His poetry remains among the best loved in the English language, and he is fondly remembered as a hero by the Greeks.

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