The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

3

I HAD AVIDLY READ ACCOUNTS in Blackwood’s Magazine of Mr. Humphry Davy’s work, and had managed at Oxford to obtain a copy of the Proceedings of the Royal Society in which he explained the process by which he had galvanised a cat. Quite by chance I opened a copy of the Gentleman’s Magazine, two or three days after arriving in London, and saw there advertised a course of lectures by Mr. Davy at the Society for the Encouragement of Arts and Manufactures under the title “Electricity Not Mysterious.”

When I attended the first lecture, having purchased a ticket for the entire series at the door, I was surprised to find that the hall of the Society was all but full. Mr. Davy was younger than I expected, fresh-faced, keen and quick in all his movements; the young men in the audience held their hats upon their knees, and strained forward to watch him. He was preparing some galvanic batteries on a table while, on the opposite side of the raised stage, there was a cylindrical device that glistened in the light of the oil-lamps.

Mr. Davy seemed to have the temperament of an artist. He spoke of the electrical current as a fulfilment of the Greek philosophers’ proposition that there is a fire within all things. He called it the spark of life, the Promethean flame, and the light of the world. “Pray do not be alarmed,” he said. “Nothing will touch you or harm you in any way.” Then he connected the galvanic equipment and, at the touch of his hand, a great arc of flashing light crossed from one table to the other. Two or three ladies shrieked, only to be rebuked by their companions with laughter, but there was a general fervour and excitement in the hall. I blinked, but there was still an after-image of the flash upon my retina; it seemed that I had looked into the heart of creation.

“It is over,” Mr. Davy said in reassurance to the ladies. “It is gone. But it is infinitely repeatable.” There was a slight smell of burning, or of singeing, in the air. “We have come to no harm,” he continued, “because electricity is the most natural force in the world. In truth it is the natural force. To my reckoning, like air and water, it is one of the constituents of life. It may be one of the principal means of begetting life. The electrical fluid itself is infinitely sensitive and subtle. It works with miraculous effect in the aether, yet it also flows through the human frame silently and invisibly. Dr. Darwin, who very sensibly proposed the differentiation between vitreous and resinous electricity according to their seats of operation, preserved a piece of vermicelli in an electrical case until it began to move with voluntary motion. What could then not be achieved with the human organs under like conditions?”

Mr. Davy went on to describe the curious experiments of the Scottish galvanist, James Macpherson, who had been given especial permission by the Company of Surgeons to be present at the dissection of a felon in Surgeons’ Hall. The body had been taken fresh from the gallows at Newgate and delivered while it was still warm; the hanged man was young, the murderer of his mother, and there was no popular execration against the use of his body. The corpse was laid flat upon the wooden slab in the middle of the hall. Eager students were sitting around it in what can only be described as the theatre of operations. I began to feel a prickling sensation down my back: I believed that I could see it all before me.

Mr. Macpherson attached electrical wires, altogether slender and pliable, to the extremities of the corpse. When the galvanic equipment was brought into operation the body shuddered and then, with no principle of movement apparent, rolled itself into a tight ball. The head, according to Mr. Davy, was between the legs of the young man and the hands tightly clenched. He compared it to the image of an abortive infant taken from the womb. Like many others in the audience, I am sure, I listened with horror as Mr. Davy explained how the body could not be unravelled and how in this clenched and unnatural posture it was consigned to the lime pit in the grounds of Newgate Prison. Such was the power of the electrical current.

I left while questions were being put to Mr. Davy, and walked out into the street. Whether it was the atmosphere of the place, or whether it was the influence of the electric current in the aether, I felt stifled. I walked quickly, but then broke into a run. I knew that I had to escape the confines of the city. It was the strangest impulse I had ever experienced, so alarming and so urgent that my heart seemed to beat faster with every pace I took. I might have been fleeing from someone, or something, but the nature of my pursuer was not known to me. Was it an episode of madness? I may even have looked over my shoulder on one or two occasions. I do not recall.

I continued my flight past the Oxford Road and continued northwards. There were some who called after me, presuming that I was escaping from the Runners or some other force-they shouted encouragement. By a timber yard some children ran with me for a while, hooting and jeering, but they soon left off. And then, as I passed a public house and turnpike on the edge of fields, I had the most curious notion that someone else was running beside me. I could not see him, or hear him, but I was fully aware of his presence as I ran over a rough track. It could not have been my shadow, because the moon was obscured behind clouds. It was some image, some phantasm-I scarcely knew-which insisted on keeping up with my rapid strides. I ran all the faster to shake off this extraordinary sensation, and I skirted a large pond before crossing a field of brick kilns and smoking refuse. I was now on the very edge of the city, where there were a few straggling tenements, fetid ditches and hog pens. Still I did not slacken my pace, and still the other ran close beside me. The ground now began to rise and, as I passed beside some infirm and wasted trees, I stumbled upon a root or branch; I was about to fall upon the ground when, to my astonishment and fear, something seemed to lift me up and save me from falling. It occurred to me even then that I was sick of some nervous fever, and I slowed my pace a little. I made my way towards an oak, its shape outlined in the darkness, and rested against it.

I sat there, recovering my breath; I felt my forehead for evidence of fever, but perceived none.

I do not think I slept, or ever lost my waking consciousness, but the fear left me without any sign of its passing. I had returned to myself, as it were; yet with a sense of resignation that felt almost like weariness. I experienced a curious sense of acceptance-not of relief or of gratitude-when I had no notion of any burden being taken from me. I believed that I had been marked out in a way that I could not then comprehend. Gradually I became aware of a sound, like that of some avalanche or rock-fall; I sat up alarmed, recalling the disasters of my own region, but I quickly realised that it was the noise of London, a confused but not inharmonious muttering as if the city were talking in its sleep. I could see some fitful lights; but the predominant impression was one of brooding darkness, an inchoate roar of vast life momentarily stilled. I got up from the base of the oak tree, and walked down towards it.

IT WAS RAINING WHEN I CAME to the threshold of the city, a quiet steady rain that cast a veil over the streets. On such a night there were few people abroad, and my footsteps rang distinctly against the cobbles as I made my way towards the Oxford Road. I did not want to return to Berners Street, not yet. I had the absurd superstition that something might be waiting to greet me there, and instead I decided to walk on to Poland Street where I hoped to find Bysshe still awake. It was his custom to write, or to talk, by candlelight and then to watch the first stirrings of dawn creep beneath his casement window. Sure enough, when I passed his first-floor lodgings, I saw the light burning. I threw some pebbles against the pane, and he unfastened the shutter; seeing me in the narrow street below, he opened the window and threw down the keys. “You have heard the chimes at midnight,” he called to me. “Come up!”

“Are you quite well, Victor?” he asked me when he opened his door above the first flight of stair. I must have been breathing heavily. “You seem to be in a cold sweat.”

“Rain. Nothing more. It is a bad night.”

“Come in and warm yourself.” Then he said to someone, over his shoulder, “We have a visitor.”

Daniel Westbrook rose to greet me when I entered the room. “We were just discussing you, Mr. Frankenstein,” he said.

“Please call me Victor.”

“I was curious about your studies.”

“Oh, yes?”

“I told him, Victor, that you are a student of galvanism. You are interested in the principles of life.”

“I am interested in the springs of life,” I said. “That is true.”

“Where it comes from?” Westbrook asked me.

“Where it might come from. What else have you two been discussing? I cannot be a topic of absorbing interest.”

“We have been discussing, Victor, the future of Daniel’s sister.”

“Mr. Shelley has seen my father.”

“Really? When did this occur?” The conversation in the tavern, when Bysshe pledged himself to educate Harriet Westbrook at his own expense, had taken place three days before.

“I visited the Westbrook family yesterday morning,” Bysshe replied. “I believed that Sunday was, for Daniel’s father, the only day of consideration.”

“Mr. Shelley-” Westbrook began.

“Bysshe,” he said. “Merely Bysshe and Victor.”

“Bysshe was remorseless. He remonstrated with my father for allowing Harriet to consort with loose females.”

“I exaggerated. To make the point. Harriet had already left the room.”

“He pleaded with him to allow her the study of improving authors.”

“I know that she can read. She told me so.”

“And then, in a final moment of passion, he offered my father money.”

“That did it. I promised to pay to him the exact amount of Harriet’s earnings, with another guinea a week. These religious men love lucre. Stand by the fire, Victor, you are still trembling.”

“My father,” Westbrook said, “is a poor man as well as a religious one.”

“I am not blaming him for his poverty. I am blaming him for his neglect of Harriet.”

“Where will you place her?” I asked Bysshe.

“I do not intend to place her anywhere. No. That is not true. I will place her here.”

“You mean-” I looked around at the mass of books and papers; his lodgings were in the same degree of confusion as his rooms in Oxford.

“I intend to educate her myself. Daniel and I have been discussing the question of female education as the necessary preliminary to female suffrage. I will introduce Harriet to Plato, Voltaire, the divine Shakespeare.”

“That is rich fare for a young girl.”

“Daniel assures me that she is eager to learn on her own account. They began to read under the tutelage of their mother.”

“She is dead now,” Westbrook said.

“And Daniel passes books to her still which she reads on Sunday within the pages of her Bible.”

“So she will come here?” I asked.

“What of it?”

“She has no female to accompany her?”

“You are still the solid citizen of Geneva, Victor. There are no such conventions in London. In this part of London. And, if there were, I would be happy to break them!” He looked at Westbrook. “I have Harriet’s interests wholly at heart. I will read to her. Look.” He went over to a pile of books, half-fallen on the carpet, and picked up one of them. “Volney’s Ruin of Empires. You know it, Victor?” I nodded. “From this she will learn how unjust power is doomed and how all tyrants decay.”

“I trust she enjoys it,” I said.

“And what would you have me read to her? The novels of Fanny Burney? They are the fetters that bind young women in their servitude. I am lending this book to Daniel.” He returned to the pile, and held up Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. “When he has thoroughly absorbed it, I will present it to his sister. Do you agree, Daniel?”

“What was the phrase you used to me?” Westbrook asked. “‘We must break up the ground.’”

“Precisely. We speak of radical reformation, but radical means root. Root and branch. We must take reform to all spheres of activity. Victor is interested in voltaic activity. I am interested in Harriet’s soul. They are precisely comparable.” He had excited himself in the course of this conversation, and opened the window to breathe in the cool damp air.

“What a night,” he said. “On such a night as this I imagine stray watery phantoms in the streets of London. But can you see ghosts in mists?”

I went over to Westbrook. “Your sister is happy with the new arrangement?”

“She is overjoyed, Mr. Frankenstein. She has a thirst for knowledge.”

“So be it.” I turned to Shelley. “I had never considered you to be a teacher, Bysshe.”

“Every poet is a teacher. Daniel agrees with me in that matter. He worships the Lake poets. He can quote from memory ‘Tintern Abbey.’”

“I know the last lines,” Westbrook murmured to me. “I have never forgotten them.”

“When does Miss Westbrook begin her studies with you?” I asked Bysshe.

“Tomorrow morning. She will be coming here early. I gave her a copy of Mrs. Barbauld’s Moral Tales to impress her father, but we will discard it. I would like her to read some Aesop to begin. He charms the fancy, and instructs the mind. There will be some hard words, too, which I will interpret.”

“I will call for her at six tomorrow evening,” Daniel Westbrook said.

“But that means you cannot come to the play.”

“The play? What play?”

“Melmoth the Wanderer. It is Cunningham’s latest. It opens tomorrow night. But wait. If you take her home in a cab, Daniel, you can meet us in front of the theatre.”

“I am not accustomed to cabs,” Westbrook said.

“Here.” Bysshe took from his pocket a sovereign. “You cannot miss the drama.”

It was clear to me that Westbrook did not want to accept the coin; he was awkward and abashed. Bysshe understood this immediately, and regretted what had been an instinctive gesture. “Or would you rather enjoy the evening with your sister?”

“I think so. Yes.” Westbrook returned the sovereign to Bysshe. “It is generous of you, sir, but I am not really used to generosity. My sister is more worthy of it.”

“We are all unworthy,” Shelley said. “Of course you must come, Victor. We will sup full of horrors.”

I agreed, and I took my leave soon after. I was dreadfully tired by the events of that night. Westbrook accompanied me to Berners Street since, as he said, I needed a native to guide me through Soho. I could hear the sound of revelry close by, and instinctively I shrank from it.

“Are you a lover of London?” he asked me.

“I scarcely know it. I am excited by it.”

“In what way?”

“By its energetic life. It is possible to feel here that you are part of the movement of the age. Part of a great enterprise. I come from a secluded region where such things are unknown.”

“I heard you say that you came from Geneva.”

“In a sense. Yes. But Geneva is a small city. I am really from the Alpine country, where we walk among the mountains. We are by nature solitary.”

“I envy you very much.”

“Do you? I have never considered it a state to be envied.”

“It gives you power, Mr. Frankenstein. It gives you will.”

I was surprised by this and stayed silent as we crossed the Oxford Road. “In Geneva, we have no gas lamps.”

“These are a novelty. Yet it is surprising how quickly one grows accustomed to the glare. Do you see the intense shadows that it casts? Look how your shadow stretches across the wall! Here is your street.”

“Which way do you go, Mr. Westbrook?”

“East. Where else?” He laughed. “That is where my destiny lies. We will see each other soon. Goodnight to you.”

I watched him walking briskly down the Oxford Road, and then I turned into Berners Street. I approached the door with some dread, all the more powerful for being indefinable, but then I quickly crossed the threshold and mounted the stairs. My chambers were dark, and I lit with a Lucifer match a small oil-lamp; in its sputtering wick the room seemed to change shape and size before settling to its customary dimensions. I sat down in an old-fashioned elbow chair, by the side of my bed, and sought to reflect upon the experiences of that night. I was aware that I had been brushed by some power, but I did not know how I was supposed to consider it.

In the silence I could hear footsteps coming along Berners Street -the tread of one person, but very pronounced and awkward as if he or she were labouring under some burden. The steps then halted, just outside my window. I sat very still, all my faculties in absolute suspense. Then after a minute or so the footsteps resumed upon the cobbles, but with a lighter tread than before. I went over to the window. But I could see no one.

As I lay in my bed that night, I dreamed that I was being buried, and that my coffin was being slowly lowered into the earth. I seemed to be aware of this without any particular consciousness of dread. But then, as my coffin was settled onto the bed of soil, I became aware that I was not alone. Someone was lying beside me.