CHAPTER 1

Frankenstein's Mother

I slept, indeed, but I was disturbed by the wildest dreams.... I thought thatI held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, andI saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel.

—from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

A dreadful creature, still reeking of the graveyard parts from which he wasassembled, opens his dull yellow eyes and breathes. Cowering before him is apale-faced young scientist, horror-struck by what he has brought to life. Inthat moment Dr. Victor Frankenstein became the father of a monster who hashaunted the world's imagination ever since.

The true mother of Frankenstein and his monster, however, was MaryWollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, who conceived them both when she was nineteenyears old.

Even as a young girl, Mary had a taste for graveyards. Her slender figure in itsloose muslin dress and flat-heeled shoes could often be seen threading its waythrough the streets of early nineteenth-century London toward old St. Pancraschurchyard, the site of her mother's grave.

It was a long walk to the outskirts of the city, but Mary didn't mind. In herearly teens, pale and pretty with delicate features and almond-shaped eyes thatchanged from gray to hazel under a cloud of light reddish-brown hair, she lookedmore fragile than she was. Besides, no matter how long the walk, it was worth itto get away from her large, mismatched (five children, no two parents incommon), and often irritating family.

Leaving behind the schoolroom she shared with her half-sister Fanny and herstepsister Jane, and the sound of young William's boots thumping and clatteringthrough the rickety five-story house, Mary pattered down the stump-a-stumpstaircase, past the study where her father spent his days writing and receivingcallers under the watchful eyes of the portrait of his first wife. Down anotherflight of stairs and she was in the bookshop. She slipped past her stepmother,busy with customers, and emerged from under the carved figure of Aesop that hungabove the door of M. J. Godwin & Co. Displayed in the corner shop's curvedwindow were the children's books her father and stepmother published and sold.

She walked west along Skinner Street, past milliners, furriers, coffee dealers,oil shops, and warehouses. Like most streets in nineteenth-century London,Skinner Street was noisy with the clatter of horses' hooves and iron-wheeledcarts careening over cobblestones, smelly and dirty with the contents of chamberpots flung from upper windows and running through the open sewers of thestreets, cruel with rowdies like the gangs around the corner on Snow Hill whowere known to shove old women into barrels and roll them downhill.

A few blocks to the northeast, live cattle jostled down St. John's Street toSmithfield Market every morning to be sold and slaughtered. One block to thesoutheast, near Newgate Prison, huge crowds gathered outside the Old Baileycourthouse on hanging days to watch the fun before adjourning to the Magpie andStump for a pint of ale. Turning her back on these killing fields, Marycontinued west along Holborn and then north.

The crowded, dirty, noisy, smelly life of the streets buzzed around her.Playbills plastered shop windows, drunks reeled from beer pubs and gin palaces,peddlers cried their wares, shouts rose from back-alley dogfights andcockfights, ballad singers bawled the story of the latest sensational crime, andeager customers bought cheap broadsheets filled with tales of murder and doomedcriminals' last confessions.

As she reached the neighborhood of St. Pancras, the noise and filth fell away.Here, within sight of the green fields of Camden Town, Mary was born and hadlived until she was ten years old. Reaching the old church and the peacefultree-shaded churchyard beside it, she settled down, as always, on her favoritebench next to her mother's tomb.

It was here she came to daydream, to make up stories that would ward off theloneliness she often felt despite her large family and her friends. Somethingwas missing in her life—some beloved companion with whom she could share herinnermost hopes and dreams. "Loneliness has been the curse of my life," shelater wrote. "What should I have done if my imagination had not been mycompanion? I must have groveled on the earth—I must have died—O but my dreams mydarling sun bright dreams! They peopled the churchyard I was doomed so young towander in."

Graveyards could be pleasant places in those days; people often treated themlike parks, quiet spots of shade and green away from the glare and noise of thecity. At night, lovers met and made love among the gravestones. But Mary knewwhat lay beneath the earth. In some parts of London, burial grounds were so fullthat from time to time corpses piled on top of each other would break throughthe surface, emitting a poisonous stench.

At night in St. Sepulchre's churchyard, a few blocks from where Mary lived,grave robbers dug bodies from fresh graves, then sold their gruesome harvest tothe surgeons at nearby St. Bartholemew's Hospital, who had few legal ways to getthe bodies they needed to dissect and study except from these "resurrectionmen." Most of the time, Mary was able to keep the two realities separate—thepleasant trees and grass, the old stone church aboveground, the rotting bodies,including her mother's, below.

Mary had been coming to her mother's grave ever since she was a little girl, herhand clasped in her father's. She always recognized it by the two weeping willowtrees her father had planted on either side. Sometimes he would take her fingerand help her trace the letters carved on the stone: Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin,she would repeat after him, her tongue stumbling over the hard words as herfinger followed the sharp edges of the stone. Author of A Vindication of theRights of Woman, Born 27th April 1759/Died 10th September 1797. They were thefirst words she learned to read. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was her name too,the same name as belonged to the woman who had died giving her daughter life.She'd heard the story many times.

During the summer of 1797, immense storms had ravaged England. Tidal floods andwhirling waterspouts struck the coast....