The Age of Wonder (58 page)

But the Creature has attained a kind of self-knowledge, and even humility: ‘When I call over the frightful catalogue of my deeds, I cannot believe that I am he whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty of the world. But it is even so. The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation. I am quite alone…He is dead who called me into being; and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish…I shall no longer see the sun or stars, or feel the winds play on my cheeks.’
⁶⁷

6

Victor Frankenstein’s experiment in soul-making had ended in disaster. The novel itself disappeared into temporary obscurity, and fewer than 500 copies were sold of the first edition. But it was made famous, if not notorious, in the 1820s by no less than five adaptations for the stage. These caused widespread controversy. The first was staged in London in July 1823, at the English Opera House in The Strand. It was entitled portentously
Presumption: or The Fate of Frankenstein.
From the start there was sensational publicity:

Do not go to the Opera House to see the Monstrous Drama, founded on the improper work called FRANKENSTEIN!!! Do not take your wives, do not take your daughters, do not take your families!!!-The novel itself is of a decidedly immoral tendency; it treats of a subject which in nature cannot occur. This subject is PREGNANT with mischief; and to prevent the ill-consequences which may result from the promulgation of such dangerous Doctrines, a few zealous friends of morality, and promoters of the Posting-bill (and who are ready to meet the consequences thereof) are using their strongest endeavours.
⁶⁸

The part of ‘The Creature’, which was cleverly and sinisterly left
blank
in the programme, made the actor T.P. Cooke famous (despite his terrible gout)-just as it later made Boris Karloff famous. Over the next four years there were fourteen separate productions, mounted in London, Bristol, Paris and New York.

Presumption
made several fundamental changes to Mary Shelley’s novel, all without her permission. Nor did she receive any copyright fees. Curiously she did not seem to mind, and when she herself went to see the play in September 1823 she loved it. ‘But lo & behold! I found myself famous! Frankenstein had prodigious success as a drama at the English Opera House…Mr. Cooke played the “
blank’s
” part extremely well-his trying to grasp at the sounds he heard-all he does was well imagined and executed…it appears to excite a breathless eagerness in the audience…in the early performances all the ladies fainted and hubbub ensued!…They continue to play it even now.’
⁶⁹

Yet the changes have influenced almost all subsequent stage and film productions. They altered the scientific and moral themes of the book, and shifted it permanently towards a mixture of gothic melodrama and black farce. Victor Frankenstein is made the archetypal mad and evil scientist. He has stood for this role ever since. But in the original novel he is also a romantic and idealistic figure, obsessive rather than evil, and determined to benefit mankind. His demoniac laboratory becomes the centre of dramatic interest, with fizzing electrical generators, sinister bubbling vats and violent explosions. But no such laboratory is described in the novel: Frankenstein works by candlelight at a surgical table. He is also given a comic German assistant called Fritz, who adds gothic farce to the whole proceedings. There is no such assistant in the novel: Frankenstein’s work is essentially solitary and dedicated, like that of an artist.

But the most important change of all is this. Mary Shelley’s unnamed Creature is transformed into the ‘Monster’, and made completely dumb. He is deprived of all words, whereas in the novel he is superbly and even tragically articulate: ‘And what was I? Of my creation and my creator I was absolutely ignorant…Where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing…I was, besides, endued with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome. I was not even of the same nature as man…When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, then, a Monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned? I cannot describe the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me…Oh, that I had forever remained in my native wood, nor known nor felt beyond the sensations of hunger, thirst and heat!’
⁷⁰

7

William Lawrence’s experiment ended in an altogether different way. At the end of 1819 he withdrew his
Natural History of Man,
yielding to pressure from the Royal College of Surgeons and a number of medical institutions. But he continued to speak out in favour of scientific freedom. ‘I take the opportunity of protesting, in the strongest possible terms…against the attempt to stifle impartial enquiry by an outcry of pernicious tendency; and against perverting science and literature, which naturally tend to bring mankind acquainted with each other, to the anti-social purpose of inflaming and prolonging national prejudice and animosity.’
⁷¹

Lawrence allowed the radical publisher Richard Carlile to reissue a pirate edition of the
Natural History
in 1822, which ran to nine editions (Carlile also successfully pirated Shelley’s
Queen Mab
). Carlile wrote his own pamphlet,
Address to the Men of Science
(1821), in which he urged Lawrence and others to retain their intellectual independence. When Carlile died, in a final gesture of support, he gave Lawrence his corpse for dissection, an almost unheard-of bequest.
⁷²

Lawrence was also supported by Thomas Wakley, mercurial editor of the newly founded medical journal the
Lancet.
In scintillating and lively articles, Wakley attacked the old guard of the Royal College, and satirised the attempts of Abernethy and others to bring theology into the surgical theatre. Whenever they dissected some haemorrhaging organ, or pulsating artery, Wakley mocked, they would exclaim ‘with uplifted eye, and most reverentially contracted mouth: “
Gintilmen,
behold the
winderful
evidence of
Desin!
” ’
⁷³

But in 1829 William Lawrence stood for the Council of the Royal College of Surgeons, a body famous for its conservatism. Silently renouncing his radical and ‘materialist’ views, he went to see his old patron and enemy John Abernethy. It was not a meeting on the Mer de Glace. After long discussions, Lawrence received forgiveness and wholehearted support from his old mentor. Lawrence was unanimously elected, and when his old comrade-in-arms Thomas Wakley came to protest on behalf of the
Lancet,
Lawrence helped to physically manhandle him out of the Council chamber. Sir William Lawrence finished his career as Surgeon-General to Queen Victoria, and was created a baronet. But perhaps he had lost his own soul.

^♣
This is a line of argument that has a long scientific footprint, and can be found being used to great rhetorical effect today by Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. Against this, it is interesting to read the defence of the necessary and dynamic notion of ‘mystery’ by Humphry Davy in his lectures (see my Prologue), or by the great twentieth-century American physicist Richard Feynman in
The Meaning of it All
(posthumously published in 1999). Though not a religious man, Feynman believed that science was driven by a continual dialogue between sceptical enquiry and the sense of inexplicable mystery, and that if either got the upper hand true science would be destroyed. See James Gleick,
Richard Feynman and Modern Physics
(1992).

^♣
This is possibly the first scientific identification of the famous ‘placebo effect’, although it would not be properly tested and defined until the 1950s. It has been claimed that over 30 per cent of all patients show a ‘placebo’ response, most notably in cases of depression, heart disease and chronic muscular pain. This figure has recently been questioned, since the earlier trials may have been methodologically flawed (they lacked a neutral ‘control’ group of patients); and the definition of ‘cure’ itself is open to a high degree of subjective distortion. e.g. Who is to say when a depression is cured, or how to measure if a severe pain is reduced to a milder one? This is similar to the problems Davy encountered when trying to describe objectively the effects of nitrous oxide. Nevertheless, the 1784 commission’s work indicates why Vitalism raised genuine scientific questions, and also drew attention to that mysterious area which Coleridge (again) would define as ‘psychosomatic’-the mind-body interface. There is an elegant passage in his notebooks wondering what causes men to blush, and the female nipple to become erect. Shelley composed an intriguing poem, ‘The Magnetic Lady to her Patient’ (1822), and Thomas De Quincey wrote a fine reflective essay, ‘Animal Magnetism’, for
Tait’s Magazine
in 1834, investigating this subject, which remains alive in the continuing debate about ‘alternative medicine’.

^♣
Richard Dawkins has praised this passage from Coleridge as ‘good science’, in his remarkable study of Science and Romanticism,
Unweaving the Rainbow
(1998, Chapter 3, ‘Bar Codes in the Stars’). The whole chapter gives a scientist’s lively view of Haydon’s dinner party, to which Dawkins, the Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, would clearly have liked to have been invited-as would I.

^♣
Mary Shelley adds as her own footnote in the novel: ‘* the moon’.

8
Davy and the Lamp

1

After the hugely successful Geology Lectures of spring 1811 in Dublin, Humphry Davy returned to the west of England on a summer fishing expedition. Here, while innocently angling along the banks of the river Wye, he himself was hooked by a small, dark and vivacious Scottish beauty, Jane Apreece. For the first time in his life he fell desperately in love, and felt a power that might be greater than science.

Jane, who had heard him lecture in Ireland, was, initially at least, rather cool about him. She wrote to a friend on 4 March 1811: ‘Mr Davy is remarkably pleasant, & all the fashion & celebrity of admiration do not injure his unaffectedness. It is said that a more dangerous Power in the sprightly form of an Irish Peeress may probably burn some of his combustible matter & at least singe if not scarifying his heart.’
¹

Jane was thirty-one, a widow and an heiress. She was known in Edinburgh as a wit and a
belle esprit.
She dressed beautifully, and talked flamboyantly: she had a kind of electrical energy about her. Davy loved energy. Jane had travelled widely in Europe, and spoke fluent French and Italian. She could read Latin, and she liked going to lectures. She was clever, self-confident and original.

Apart from Anna Beddoes, Davy’s decade of success and glamour at the Royal Institution had brought him various flirtations, as evidenced by the many Valentine poems addressed to him there.
²
But as he wrote to his mother, until he met Jane Apreece he had never seriously considered marriage, and had felt that a scientific career was not compatible with a wife and family. His true bride was Science. However, perhaps his notions of scientific celibacy were changing.

Jane was a romantic figure. She was the daughter of Charles Kerr of Kelso, who had made a fortune in Antigua, and left her a considerable inheritance. She may also have had some West Indian blood in her veins. There was certainly something tropical in her temperament. Her first marriage, at nineteen, to a much older man, a decrepit Welsh baronet languidly named Shuckburgh Ashby Apreece, had been unhappy and childless. Its best aspect, said Jane, was that he had frequently taken her abroad. In Geneva she made friends with Madame de Staël, and later claimed to be the original of the heroine of de Staël’s sensational romance
Corinne
(1807), about a lonely woman who finds love in southern climes.

She had other literary connections. She knew Sydney Smith and the waspish novelist Horace Walpole. In London, she once dined with William Blake. She was a subscriber to Coleridge’s philosophical magazine
The Friend.
Walter Scott was a distant cousin, and a close friend. In the summer of 1810 they had toured the Highlands and the Hebrides together, and he observed that she was headstrong, inquisitive and not frightened by storms. They got on well, teasing each other as cousins should, but Scott was clearly a little in awe of her. He wrote in his journal that he thought her ‘more French than English, and partaking of the Creole vivacity and suppleness’. It is not quite clear what he meant by this last compliment, perhaps that Jane was volatile and sexually provocative. She certainly had social ambitions: ‘as a lion-catcher, I would pit her against the world. She flung her lasso over Byron himself.’
³

But Jane was also clever and independent-minded. After she was widowed in 1809, she established an intellectual salon in Heriot Row, and cut a swathe through the Scottish academics. She was particularly drawn to scientific men. The mathematician Professor John Playfair, who had superbly interpreted Hutton’s geology to the world, was said to have once knelt submissively in Princes Street to resolve the complicated stratifications of her laced boots. The wit Sydney Smith-who was also lecturing at the Royal Institution-was enchanted by her, and throughout his life retold endless suggestive anecdotes about her encounters. Everyone agreed that beneath a certain flamboyance and affectation, Jane had ‘an excellent heart’.

Evidently Jane Apreece was a vivid personality, and someone who attracted gossip all her life. Yet her story is not well-documented, compared to Davy’s, and it is strange for such a beauty that no portrait exists in a public collection.
⁴
Little of her early correspondence is known to have survived, though it is remarkable that she eventually kept more than ninety of Davy’s letters to her.
⁵
He began writing them in August 1811, after they had been briefly together in a sailing party on the Wye. He was still fishing at Denham and preparing his autumn lectures, while she had returned to Scotland. From the start his letters were a dreamy combination of science and sensibility: ‘The clear and rapid Colne which moves over a green bed, living with beautiful aquatic plants the flowers of which glisten on its surface, is immediately beneath the window at which I am writing…I have scarcely a wish beyond the present moment except that I might see you as the Naiad of this stream, but you are now a mountain Nymph & scorn our low and quiet pastoral scenery.’
⁶
Receiving letters from her gave him ‘a higher sensation than even exhilatory gas. I may be permitted a chemical allusion as we are both now pursuing the same science.’
⁷

Rather surprisingly, Davy consulted his old flame Anna Beddoes about Jane Apreece. Anna had met Jane socially through the Edgeworth family in Ireland, and Davy innocently passed on her barbed compliments. ‘Mrs Beddoes says “I do admire Mrs Apreece, I think her very pleasing, feel her abilities and almost believe if I knew her I should love her-more I suppose than she should love me.” ’
⁸

That autumn, Jane left Edinburgh and moved to London, taking up residence in an elegant house at 16 Berkeley Square, strategically placed within ten minutes’ walk of the Royal Institution.
⁹
Davy began sending her books-Izaak Walton’s
Compleat Angler,
of course, but also Anacreon and other classical love poets. Then came copies of his Chemical Lectures ‘decyphered’ into plain English; and then-his own sonnets. She in turn began to attend his autumn lectures, announced that she was ‘of the true faith of the genuine Angler’, and gallantly set herself to undertake a private course of ‘chemical studies’.

It was now Jane’s turn to send verses to Davy, though these have not survived. He responded gravely: ‘Your mind is “of poetical frame” for there is no mind in which so much feeling is blended with so much thought.’ The man who had once seen the poems of Southey and Wordsworth through the press risked the mild criticism that perhaps her verses were a little artificial by Romantic standards: ‘You want only the habit of connecting pictures from natural imagery with moods of human passion to become a genuine poet.’
¹⁰
Jane took this well.

Throughout that autumn Davy assiduously introduced Jane to the lions of the scientific world. She was escorted to his lectures by the distinguished chemist Professor Charles Hatchett (’we shall both be proud to be in your train’), and dined in a party with William Herschel, when they discussed the distance of the furthest stars.
¹¹
He was also able to introduce her to Robert Southey, and share literary gossip about the quarrel between Coleridge and Wordsworth.

Davy was now less intimate with Coleridge. In March 1809 Coleridge had come near to quarrelling with him, because Davy would not let the Royal Institution support his scheme to publish
The Friend:
‘Davy’s conduct
wounds
me.’ Coleridge felt fame had gone to Davy’s head, and that his high-handed (or perhaps prudent) behaviour betrayed their friendship, even though they had been ‘intimate these nine years or more’. He claimed he had written a long poem-‘the only verses I have made for years’-praising Davy’s ‘Genius and great Services to mankind’. But now he had no thoughts of publishing it: Davy was too caught up in his own fame, exactly as Coleridge had once prophesied.
¹²

But love, not fame, was on Davy’s mind. By 1 November he was writing to Jane with increasing intensity, the romantic fisherman now replaced by the romantic man of science. ‘There is a law of sensation which may be called the law of continuity & contrast of which you may read in Darwin’s
Zoomania
[sic]. An example is-look long on a spot of pink, & close your eyes, the impression will continue for some time & will then be succeeded by a green light. For some days after I quitted you I had the pink light in my eyes & the rosy feelings in my heart, but now the green hue & feelings-not of jealousy-but of regret are come.’
¹³

When Davy left for his December lectures in Dublin, absence only deepened his feelings. His lectures were heaped with praise, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Trinity College, and was ‘overpowered’ by admirers at receptions and banquets. Yet despite all this, he could think of nothing but Jane Apreece. His courtship became more open and direct. Amidst his public triumph, Davy secretly gave way to the language of love. On 4 December 1811 he wrote from his rooms at the Dublin Society: ‘I have the power of dreaming and picture-making as strong as when I was fifteen. I call up the green woods and the gleams of sunshine darting through them, and the upland meadows where we took our long walk. I seem to hear, as then, the delightful sound of the nightingale interrupted by the more delightful sound of your voice. You will perhaps laugh at this visionary mood, and call it romance; but without such feelings life would be of little worth…Without this, its tones are like those of the Aeolian harp, broken, wild, and uncertain, fickle as the wind that produced them, beginning without order, ending without effect…To see you is the strongest wish of my heart.’
¹⁴
The imagery of several of Coleridge’s poems rises opportunely through these letters.

On his return to the Royal Institution, Davy set himself to storm her with more scientific seductions. ‘You are my magnet (though you differ from a magnet in having no repulsive points) and direct my course.’ By March 1812 he was writing: ‘I no longer live for anything but you…Your felicity will be the pole star of my future course.’
¹⁵
But he was intimidated by her aristocratic friends, and perhaps by her money. He may secretly have feared that Jane’s sparkling wit and love of socialising might interfere with the necessary routine and self-concentration of his laboratory work. He continued gallantly to insist that they would not; and what is more, so did she.

Jane, in turn, admired Davy’s brilliance, his handsome boyish figure, and the intellectual glamour that attached to him as celebrated lecturer. She had many other suitors at this point in her life, but none so intense or determined-or so serious. Perhaps that may have been a problem. In private she may have laughed at Davy’s didactic and over-earnest moments, the lecturer overcoming the suitor, as was sometimes revealed in the solemn
longueurs
of his love letters: ‘Your moral virtues always improved me & exalted my ideas of human nature.’ Jane was not impressed by her own moral virtues.

When she once teased him with being absurdly romantic about her, he was incapable of wittily turning the shaft, as Sydney Smith would certainly have done. Instead of a seductive epigram, he delivered a solemn oration. ‘If this be romantic, it is romantic to pursue one’s object in science; to attach the feelings strongly to any ideas; it is romantic to love the good, to admire the wise, to quit low and mean things and seek excellence.’
¹⁶

Jane may also have been worried by his Cornish background, though in a way she was a social adventurer just like him. She shrewdly suspected that her only real rival was chemistry. Davy himself once unguardedly admitted that ‘the pleasure I derived from your conversation interfered with my scientific pursuits’, though hastily adding: ‘I have gained much and lost but little.’
¹⁷

On this score, both sets of friends predicted disaster. She was made for society, he was made for the laboratory. Sydney Smith, now clearly jealous, cattily used chemical imagery to beg Jane to reject Davy out of hand. On 29 December he wrote: ‘Pray remain single and marry nobody…you will be annihilated the moment you do, and instead of being an exciting alkali or acid, become a neutral salt. You may very likely be happier yourself, but you will be lost to your male friends.’
¹⁸

So Jane Apreece prevaricated in a way that Jane Austen (just writing
Pride and Prejudice
) would have approved of. She twice refused Davy’s offers of marriage, took to her bed in Berkeley Square and announced she was ill and incommunicado. But she was astonished by the tender and unguarded declaration this released from Davy: ‘For the first time in my life I have wished to be a woman that I might watch by your bedside; I might wish that I had not given up the early pursuit of medicine for then I might have been admitted as a Physician. Though an untoward Beau, you would find no more devoted Nurse.’
¹⁹
In the passionate declarations that followed, it seems that each was able to reassure the other. Davy agreed to the momentous step of giving up full-time lecturing at the Royal Institution (a thing he had secretly wanted to do for some time), while Jane assured him that her fortune would allow them to travel, while he continued his chemical researches independently. This was a tantalising prospect for both of them.