Frankenstein Dreams: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Science Fiction

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Introduction: That Gulf of Fear

Nothing is so painful to the human mind, cries Frankenstein’s pitiable monster, as a great and sudden change.

Published in 1818, Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein was itself a pained response to the great and sudden changes that shook the collective psyche of Western civilization during the nineteenth century. Advances in understanding nature—from the stars to the human body—challenged ancient and cherished assumptions about space and time and even about our lineage as human beings. Everywhere readers turned, they encountered evidence that the cosmos was older and more vast than the provincial medieval view whose strictures continued to inhibit study of the world. And as the century aged, the spiritual vertigo from dramatic revelations seemed to increase.

Every new discovery raised questions. In 1781, for example, a German-born musician named William Herschel—a self-taught amateur astronomer—discovered the planet Uranus, and accidentally shook loose the last grip that ecclesiastical thinking had on astronomy. The notion of deep space soon followed and opened the door to even more devastating concepts such as deep time, which provided eons for the gradual change of plants and animals.

Even the most passionate fans of natural history, which was an internationally popular recreation during much of the nineteenth century, found the intellectual terrain disconcertingly wobbly. What was our status in the cosmos? Were there really things called galaxies out beyond our local solar system? How can there be both a microscopic world beneath us and a telescopic world above us? Why do we find seashells fossilized on mountaintops? And, after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, people had to ask themselves if it could really be true that we are genetically related to other creatures rather than having been directly crafted from the same clay.

During the nineteenth century, from the era of the pioneer manned balloon flights to the time of the Wright brothers, the conceptual cosmos evolved from a cozy local solar system and a token prehistory to planetary kinship and the beginnings of institutionalized environmentalism. When the century opened, there were few professional scientists and no science courses in schools; church doctrine still dominated natural philosophy. By the time it ended, the once-reviled Darwin was buried in Westminster Abbey in a state funeral and the Natural History Museum in London had been built as a secular temple to knowledge—with its botanical rather than Ionic columns adorned by apes and lizards instead of gargoyles and saints.

New ways of thinking required new ways of writing, and the writer now considered the founder of science fiction saw the need for fresh metaphors while still a teenager. Mary Shelley confidently declares her position, midway between science and fancy, in her introduction to the 1818 first edition of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus:

The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin [Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles], and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence. I shall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination; yet, in assuming it as the basis of a work of fancy, I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors. The event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment. It was recommended by the novelty of the situations which it developes; and, however impossible as a physical fact, affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield.

Shelley’s last sentence could serve as a manifesto for fantastic tales in general. Not surprisingly, most critics cite Frankenstein as the founding document of the genre that this anthology celebrates. It wasn’t named science fiction until 1926; Hugo Gernsback used the term when he launched the first magazine devoted to it, Amazing Stories. Yet most critics consider modern science fiction to have emerged like Athena from the brow of Zeus in 1816, when Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (not yet Shelley) woke from a nightmare and began writing Frankenstein. The novel was an expression of some of the ancient themes of literature—anguished dread of mortality, the consequences of obsession, and hubris and consequent ate, the divine retribution that in mythology always follows overweening pride. Young Mary was an unwed, pregnant teenager. She and Percy Bysshe Shelley married later the same year.

Her first novel has lasted, in part, because the central figure quickly strode off the page and into popular culture. Nowadays the cobbled-together, nameless monster—long mistakenly known by his creator’s name—is familiar to millions who have never read the novel. He is a stock figure in horror movies, a favorite of editorial cartoonists, a cautionary fable about science. Frankenstein and his tormented creation are perfect figures to open a tour of the nineteenth century’s troubled dance between science and fiction.

In September 1831, the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge attended the British Association meeting at which the word scientist was voted in to replace the antique term natural philosopher. At the same time, a twenty-two-year-old failed medical student named Charles Darwin was packing his duffel for the Beagle voyage and packing his mind with the earthshaking notions of such geologists as James Hutton, who saw a vast prehistory behind our own recent debut. Coleridge also enjoyed the work of the popular scientist Humphry Davy. I attend Davy’s lectures, he declared, to increase my stock of metaphors.

In doing so the poet took sixty pages of notes such as this: No difference of Oxygen in cities, Woods, or Sea shore. Coleridge participated in one of Davy’s demonstrations of electric shock from a Leyden Phial, the new chemical battery. Instantly linking the physical spark with theories of vitalism versus materialism, he jotted in his notes, More’s antidote against Atheism. No spark could leap between electrodes more quickly than it could make connections in a writer’s mind.

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s preoccupation with science dated from the early days of his youth, long before he met young Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. He devoured every text he could find about astronomy, magnetism, and the recently discovered electrical nature of lightning. His younger sister recalled how he placed her and other children hand-in-hand round the nursery table to be electrified with the kind of chemical battery that fascinated Coleridge.

The cross-fertilization occurring between science and literature inspired poetry, drama, sermons—and, yes, science fiction. The stories collected in Frankenstein Dreams chronicle how Western civilization responded to the dizzying new discoveries of the nineteenth century. Gravity, time, distance, mortality, sensory limitations, our inability to divine the future—all of these barriers to the human spirit’s dreams were tackled through fantastic, entertaining tales that merged ancient human concerns with new revelations and anxieties. Technological innovations and conceptual advances created new lenses through which to view every aspect of the body and nature and society.

The variety of such sparks makes literary taxonomy difficult, but anthologizing is a subjective game. Within the lively pages of this collection, therefore, readers may consider science fiction to be loosely defined as tales of the fantastic that exclude the supernatural—no ghosts, no deities, no magic. What may sound like an arbitrary distinction actually demonstrates separate ways of regarding the cosmos. Homo sapiens is a restless, curious animal. Whether increasing or reducing heat, converting plant and animal products into clothing, redirecting streams, or constructing tools out of wood and stone, primitive human beings devoted much of their time to manipulating nature. Such attempts included investing the world with spirits and deities whose help required magical intervention—prayer, ritual, sacrifice. The scientific approach that had achieved a new worldview by the nineteenth century, in contrast, regarded nature differently and sought to manipulate it solely by nonmagical means. It is this view of nature that animates most of the stories in Frankenstein Dreams, and it proves no less moving or fantastic than earlier viewpoints.

Throughout the century, fantastic concepts permitted writers to explore real-world issues from new perspectives. Among the tales gathered in Frankenstein Dreams, Mary Shelley conjures Faustian monsters from the discoveries of Galvani regarding electricity, and explicitly cites Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus and his notions of reanimating a corpse. In his 1845 story The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, Edgar Allan Poe explores, in predictably morbid fashion, the theories of Franz Mesmer regarding hypnosis and animal magnetism. Blossoming visions of the human psyche’s complexity animate Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s disturbing 1877 story The Monarch of Dreams. Alice W. Fuller, in her pioneer story A Wife Manufactured to Order from 1895, cheerfully envisions the shortcomings of the first robot girlfriend. In The Hall Bedroom, published in 1903, the versatile Mary E. Wilkins Freeman—the only author who appears in each of the four Connoisseur’s Collection volumes so far—convincingly portrays a stumble into another dimension.

The great themes of modern science fiction showed up surprisingly early in the dawn of the genre: space travel, time travel, destroyed ecosystems, dystopian societies, and even dangerously independent machines. Trapped within the brief journey of a single lifetime, for example, many imaginative writers envisioned both the past and possible futures. Mary Shelley’s own postapocalyptic 1826 novel, The Last Man, takes place near the end of the twenty-first century, following the handful of survivors of a terrible plague. It was her ill-fated husband, after all, who described poets as the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present. Edward Page Mitchell’s thoughtful 1881 story The Clock That Went Backward, reprinted here, is one of the earliest time-travel stories, and influenced many of its more famous successors. Mitchell conjures the frisson of displacement and melancholy that is the hallmark of time-travel stories: the poignant sense of fleeting and irrecoverable time that haunts our linear lives and that H. G. Wells explored in more social terms more than a decade later, in his first scientific romance, The Time Machine.

During the nineteenth century, European writers often chose the less explored (from their point of view) regions of the earth as settings for tales of marvel and wonder. By the mid-Victorian era, imaginary trips to unexplored regions were hugely popular. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote again and again about the American frontier or the Arctic or tropical South America; and finally, in The Horror of the Heights, which you will find in this volume, he sends his characters exploring in the still unknown regions above the clouds.

Often science fiction uses technological or other nonmagical means to transcend the narrative limitations of more realistic stories, effecting the same plot boost that ghosts or vampires might contribute to another kind of story. Inventors replace witches; chemicals and machines stand in for incantations and curses. This idea emerges from a long history. Hindu and Sanskrit epics, for example, describe the vimana, a flying castle—very much a form of technology, but less invented than conjured. Sit now upon this square of tapestry, instructs the merchant who tries to sell a flying carpet to Prince Husayn in One Thousand and One Nights, and at thy mere wish and will it shall transport us to the caravanserai wherein thou abidest. Is the carpet thus a vehicle controlled by telepathy? No, it appears to be—and is treated within these magical stories as—an enchanted object, like the talking mirror in Snow White or the Wicked Witch’s crystal ball in the movie The Wizard of Oz.

In this volume, Rudyard Kipling in his story Wireless employs the recently invented radio to delve into the past, into the mind of a dead poet. Kipling, who wrote superb ghost stories such as ‘They,’ chose technology instead of spirits to animate this particular plot, but the tale has also been reprinted in collections of the supernatural. Ambrose Bierce, known for brilliant supernatural stories such as An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, appears in this anthology with four brief news-like accounts of people who suddenly vanish from mundane Earth—perhaps into another dimension. Bierce offers no spooky explanation, but this story too has appeared in collections of the supernatural.

In a rather Darwinian turn, American writer William Henry Rhodes envisions a child born with eyes that focus not upon nearby objects but only upon astronomical distances. This mutation becomes a window onto the cosmos. Rhodes’s 1876 story The Telescopic Eye, which you will find herein, also nicely demonstrates that, ninety years before the plastic masks of Star Trek, science fiction writers could envision aliens whose biology differed enormously from that of human beings:

The Lunarians are not formed at all like ourselves. They are less in height, and altogether of a different appearance. When fully grown, they resemble somewhat a chariot wheel, with four spokes, converging at the center or axle. They have four eyes in the head, which is the axle, so to speak, and all the limbs branch out directly from the center, like some sea-forms known as Radiates. They move by turning rapidly like a wheel, and travel as fast as a bird through the air. The children are undeveloped in form, and are perfectly round, like a pumpkin or orange. As they grow older, they seem to drop or absorb the rotundity of the whole body, and finally assume the appearance of a chariot wheel.

Sprinkled among the complete stories herein you will find a handful of excerpts from novels. Each such narrative is self-contained, and its individual introduction to the author and the story will set the context. The works may be too long to include in toto, but their characters and themes have proven so memorable that they demand inclusion. And they earned their fame for a reason, by virtue of shocking new ideas and compelling narrative; every anthologist hopes to send readers back to the originals.

As the selection from his Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde will demonstrate, Robert Louis Stevenson was another writer who paid considerable attention to the ever-changing science around him. He wove many contemporary issues into his 1886 novella, beginning with well-known case studies of dual personality, but they gained resonance when he mixed in evolutionary fears and the recent notion of the violent criminal as an atavistic reversion to our species’ brute past. A dramatic passage from it shows how deeply, in illuminating the duality of conscience and character, Stevenson was tapping into the zeitgeist of his era when he unleashed the primitive id. The tale was published in 1886, the year that Sigmund Freud began his clinical practice in Vienna. Two years later, when Jack the Ripper began to terrorize Whitechapel, the newspapers immediately referred to Mr. Hyde, to the lurking midnight viciousness of humanity.

H. G. Wells, who had studied with the great Victorian scientist and educator Thomas Huxley, horrifically weds the controversial topic of vivisection to Charles Darwin’s equally vexed discoveries of a bestial history for humanity. Published in 1896, The Island of Doctor Moreau is one of Wells’s most provocative and suspenseful novels. Few cautionary fables about Frankensteinian tinkering are more powerful than this grisly account of a mad vivisectionist. Vivisection was a ferociously divisive topic in late Victorian England, having occupied the attention of everyone from Charles Darwin to Lewis Carroll. Dark notions of racial degeneration, the influence of our animal nature on our supposedly nobler side, evolutionary legacies and potential, the dangers of dispassionate scientific tinkering—these and many other issues crowd Wells’s tale. Appearing near the end of this anthology, Wells’s chapter fittingly concludes the running themes of mortal and evolutionary anxiety, as Wells looks back over his shoulder at Darwin and ahead to the technological and spiritual vertigo he could foresee in the future.

Other unusual choices enliven this anthology. For example, Thomas Hardy’s 1882 novel, Two on a Tower, is not science fiction, but a brief, self-contained scene from it appears herein because it addresses the kind of science-induced anxiety that pervades science fiction of the nineteenth century—and which continues today—and also preoccupied nineteenth-century literary fiction. It demonstrates the limitations and virtues of realistic fiction in addressing the emotional and intellectual vertigo inspired by revelations of an ever larger and older cosmos.

The barriers around Hardy’s naturalistic approach illuminate the virtues of science fiction. Swithin St. Cleeve and Lady Constantine are more alive and convincing than most genre characters, but science fiction writers would have taken them into space for an unclouded gaze out at the stars and back down at Earth. Not one to soften his relentlessly male pages with romance, Jules Verne might have left Lady Constantine behind completely, but he would have made the stars themselves (not to mention the characters’ vehicle) as important in his tale as the human beings. In science fiction and fantasy, characters don’t merely talk about the borders of perception; they pass through them.

Recounting his ambitious and merciless life, Victor Frankenstein speaks often about dreams both literal and symbolic—nightmares, daydreams, visions, misconceptions, the past. At one point he states his grand ambition: My dreams were therefore undisturbed by reality; and I entered with the greatest diligence into the search of the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life. But the latter obtained my most undivided attention: wealth was an inferior object; but what glory would attend the discovery, if I could banish disease from the human frame, and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death.

Later, however, having brought to life the nameless creature who shadows and indicts his creator, Frankenstein dreams about the woman he loves. I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. 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 her flannel.

Mary Shelley lived in a time of rampant disease and death. The mortal body was not protected by antibiotics; the elderly were not hidden away in nursing homes; corpses were not sterilely embalmed by people who did not know the deceased. Graves were overfilled and the dead might well return with a spring flood. Decline and decay, the themes of Edgar Allan Poe, seem grotesque and morbid to us now, but they were the blunt reality for millennia, and for many people they are still. Shelley literally embodied her themes in a hurting, yearning form, and thus made us feel them on a visceral level. Her novel was not merely an intellectual exercise, and this bodily reality is one reason why the work endures.

Much other science fiction of the Victorian and gaslight eras also confronted the real human body in the real world, not just dreams of travel through space and time. The next to last story in this collection is by the English writer E. Nesbit. She shared both Wells’s delight in the pleasures of consciousness and his horror at finding it caged inside a mortal animal body. When she wasn’t conjuring marvelous creations such as the ancient, vainglorious bird that cavorts through The Phoenix and the Carpet or the cantankerous wish-granting Psammead or sand fairy of Five Children and It—or chronicling the less fantastical but no less entertaining Bastable family—Nesbit wrote grim, even grisly, tales of the fantastic. Superstitious, a believer in ghosts, she personifies the visceral torment of embodiment, the always looming proximity of pain and death, that haunted Mary Shelley and her descendants.

In her 1909 story The Five Senses, Nesbit daydreams about transcending the limits of bodily perception, and in doing so creates a character reminiscent of a twentieth-century superhero. Only a half century later, in the world of Marvel Comics, teenager Peter Parker would be bitten by a radioactive spider and turn himself into Spider-Man; lawyer Matt Murdock would be blinded by an encounter with radioactive material, but in return find his other senses growing fantastically acute, and he would choose to exploit them while masked as Daredevil. Nesbit’s character, in contrast, deliberately injects himself with a chemical compound that he has spent years creating. It enhances his senses so that he feels the microscopic roughness of a glass syringe and amplifies the lingering aftertaste of coffee until he can hardly bear its intensity. Nesbit’s story appears herein not because her protagonist’s elixir was scientifically convincing, but because she employed it with science-fictional intent—a glimpse beyond the possible, but not into the supernatural.

The final clause in the closing sentence of Nesbit’s story sums up the primordial fears that surge through this anthology, and thus provide the title and theme of this introduction. In referring to the depth of that gulf of fear which lies between the quick and the dead, she salutes the monsters of our darker nature conjured over the last two centuries—the merciless tormenter of Ernest Valdemar, the vicious other self of Henry Jekyll, the atavistic beast-men bowing to the merciless Doctor Moreau. And we understand again the common fate inspiring the vision of terror and grief that Victor Frankenstein dreams.

Mary Shelley

(1797–1851)

Only a small number of characters from popular culture achieve global recognition. During the last few hundred years, perhaps only Sherlock Holmes and Frankenstein’s monster reached this apogee of popularity prior to the invention of motion pictures. These figures became household names.

The origin of Frankenstein’s monster is the key moment in Mary Shelley’s revolutionary novel, and the birth of the novel itself is a milestone in the history of literature—and especially in the genre we now call science fiction. The story’s genesis brings together Enlightenment science and the Romantic critique thereof; that strutting, womanizing genius Lord Byron, as well as his physician and acolyte, John Polidori; young Mary Godwin’s lover and future husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; and the teenage Mary herself, a young woman of extraordinary intelligence and talent.

The birth of the story is even rich in lush atmosphere worthy of Shelley’s novel. Historians often refer to 1816 as the Year without a Summer, because of such dark clouds and low temperatures that winter seemed to linger and take up residence. Wagnerian thunderstorms tormented the heavens. These unusual conditions derived from clouds of ash and other substances that entered the atmosphere during the eruption of Mount Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa the previous summer and fall.

At Lake Geneva, Switzerland, in June 1816, Byron and Shelley and company were often forced to abandon their boating and hiking plans to spend time indoors. On one such occasion, at the Villa Diodati that Byron was renting on the lakeshore, Godwin and Shelley and Byron and Polidori entertained each other by reading stories from a recent anthology of German ghost stories, Fantasmagoriana, edited by a French writer and geographer named Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès. Their enjoyment of this activity inspired Byron to challenge the members of the party to each write a horrific fiction. Have you thought of a story? Shelley recalled that she was asked each morning—and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative.

Then she suffered through what would come to be one of the most famous nightmares in history:

I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.

She began writing what she thought would be a short story. But the narrative grew in her imagination, and Percy Shelley encouraged her to follow it as it became a novel. She completed it in May of the following year. In March 1818, the firm of Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones published the five-hundred-copy first edition, in a three-volume format, of Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. It was published anonymously. Not until the second edition did Shelley put her name on the title page.

Ordinarily, anthologists choose to reprint an author’s final version of a story, but critics and your editor agree that this first incarnation presents a stronger, unadulterated view of Shelley’s dark vision. Thus the following excerpt derives from Shelley’s 1818 edition. Preferring this edition to the later version is rather like refusing to accept Dickens’s surrender to Bulwer-Lytton’s suggestion of a sentimental ending to Great Expectations and keeping the first or printing both so that readers may choose their own literary adventure. Her revision was published in 1831. In her introduction to it, Shelley explicitly states, I have changed no portion of the story, and claims that her revisions were limited to matters of style. Actually she greatly altered the spirit and implications of the story. She also saluted the memory of her brief but life-changing romance with Percy Shelley, who had died in a boating accident on the northwestern coast of Italy in 1822.

Reading Bram Stoker’s classic vampire novel, Dracula, can be chilling, but in retrospect it strikes few philosophical notes and often seems absurd. Shelley’s Frankenstein, in contrast, reads as tame by our narrative standards but horrific in its implications. The critic Michael Dirda lists some of the themes apparent to an attentive reader: the persistent interconnection of sex, birth, and death; the mirroring of monster and creator; the conflict between instinctive goodness and the societal creation of the criminal; the power of nature to soften and civilize; the human yearning for sympathy and love.

In her introduction, Shelley employs the term hideous again and again. It was apt. Meaning ugly, repulsive, even disgusting, it derived, via Middle English, from an Old French word for fear. The fear of death, but also the fear of embodiment—the terror of an aspiring consciousness chained to a mortal animal—are chords that sound throughout this novel written, we must remember, by a teenage girl. And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper, she writes in her preface. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart. Its several pages speak of many a walk, many a drive, and many a conversation, when I was not alone; and my companion was one who, in this world, I shall never see more. But this is for myself; my readers have nothing to do with these associations.

And in the 1831 version of Frankenstein, Shelley removed the epigraph that haunted the opening in 1818, from Milton’s Paradise Lost:

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay

To mould me man? Did I solicit thee

From darkness to promote me?—

Dreams of Forgotten Alchemists

(from Frankenstein)

The next morning I delivered my letters of introduction and paid a visit to some of the principal professors. Chance—or rather the evil influence, the Angel of Destruction, which asserted omnipotent sway over me from the moment I turned my reluctant steps from my father’s door—led me first to M. Krempe, professor of natural philosophy. He was an uncouth man, but deeply imbued in the secrets of his science. He asked me several questions concerning my progress in the different branches of science appertaining to natural philosophy. I replied carelessly, and partly in contempt, mentioned the names of my alchemists as the principal authors I had studied. The professor stared.

Have you, he said, really spent your time in studying such nonsense?

I replied in the affirmative.

Every minute, continued M. Krempe with warmth, every instant that you have wasted on those books is utterly and entirely lost. You have burdened your memory with exploded systems and useless names. Good God! In what desert land have you lived, where no one was kind enough to inform you that these fancies which you have so greedily imbibed are a thousand years old and as musty as they are ancient? I little expected, in this enlightened and scientific age, to find a disciple of Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus. My dear sir, you must begin your studies entirely anew.

So saying, he stepped aside and wrote down a list of several books treating of natural philosophy which he desired me to procure, and dismissed me after mentioning that in the beginning of the following week he intended to commence a course of lectures upon natural philosophy in its general relations, and that M. Waldman, a fellow professor, would lecture upon chemistry the alternate days that he omitted.

I returned home not disappointed, for I have said that I had long considered those authors useless whom the professor reprobated; but I returned not at all the more inclined to recur to these studies in any shape. M. Krempe was a little squat man with a gruff voice and a repulsive countenance; the teacher, therefore, did not prepossess me in favour of his pursuits. In rather a too philosophical and connected a strain, perhaps, I have given an account of the conclusions I had come to concerning them in my early years. As a child I had not been content with the results promised by the modern professors of natural science. With a confusion of ideas only to be accounted for by my extreme youth and my want of a guide on such matters, I had retrod the steps of knowledge along the paths of time and exchanged the discoveries of recent inquirers for the dreams of forgotten alchemists. Besides, I had a contempt for the uses of modern natural philosophy. It was very different when the masters of the science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand; but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.

Such were my reflections during the first two or three days of my residence at Ingolstadt, which were chiefly spent in becoming acquainted with the localities and the principal residents in my new abode. But as the ensuing week commenced, I thought of the information which M. Krempe had given me concerning the lectures. And although I could not consent to go and hear that little conceited fellow deliver sentences out of a pulpit, I recollected what he had said of M. Waldman, whom I had never seen, as he had hitherto been out of town.

Partly from curiosity and partly from idleness, I went into the lecturing room, which M. Waldman entered shortly after. This professor was very unlike his colleague. He appeared about fifty years of age, but with an aspect expressive of the greatest benevolence; a few grey hairs covered his temples, but those at the back of his head were nearly black. His person was short but remarkably erect and his voice the sweetest I had ever heard. He began his lecture by a recapitulation of the history of chemistry and the various improvements made by different men of learning, pronouncing with fervour the names of the most distinguished discoverers. He then took a cursory view of the present state of the science and explained many of its elementary terms. After having made a few preparatory experiments, he concluded with a panegyric upon modern chemistry, the terms of which I shall never forget:

The ancient teachers of this science, said he, promised impossibilities and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her hiding-places. They ascend into the heavens; they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.

Such were the professor’s words—let me say such the words of the fate—enounced to destroy me. As he went on I felt as if my soul were grappling with a palpable enemy; one by one the various keys were touched which formed the mechanism of my being; chord after chord was sounded, and soon my mind was filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose. So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein—more, far more, will I achieve; treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.

I closed not my eyes that night. My internal being was in a state of insurrection and turmoil; I felt that order would hence arise, but I had no power to produce it. By degrees after the morning’s dawn, sleep came. I awoke, and my yesternight’s thoughts were as a dream. There only remained a resolution to return to my ancient studies and to devote myself to a science for which I believed myself to have a natural talent. On the same day I paid M. Waldman a visit. His manners in private were even more mild and attractive than in public, for there was a certain dignity in his mien during lecture which in his own house was replaced by the greatest affability and kindness. I gave him pretty nearly the same account of my former pursuits as I had given to his fellow professor. He heard with attention the little narration concerning my studies and smiled at the names of Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus, but without the contempt that M. Krempe had exhibited. He said that, These were men to whose indefatigable zeal modern philosophers were indebted for most of the foundations of their knowledge. They had left to us, as an easier task, to give new names and arrange in connected classifications the facts which they in a great degree had been the instruments of bringing to light. The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind.

I listened to his statement, which was delivered without any presumption or affectation, and then added that his lecture had removed my prejudices against modern chemists; I expressed myself in measured terms, with the modesty and deference due from a youth to his instructor, without letting escape (inexperience in life would have made me ashamed) any of the enthusiasm which stimulated my intended labours. I requested his advice concerning the books I ought to procure.

I am happy, said M. Waldman, to have gained a disciple; and if your application equals your ability, I have no doubt of your success. Chemistry is that branch of natural philosophy in which the greatest improvements have been and may be made; it is on that account that I have made it my peculiar study; but at the same time, I have not neglected the other branches of science. A man would make but a very sorry chemist if he attended to that department of human knowledge alone. If your wish is to become really a man of science and not merely a petty experimentalist, I should advise you to apply to every branch of natural philosophy, including mathematics.

He then took me into his laboratory and explained to me the uses of his various machines, instructing me as to who I ought to procure and promising me the use of his own when I should have advanced far enough in the science not to derange their mechanism. He also gave me the list of books which I had requested, and I took my leave.

Thus ended a day memorable to me; it decided my future destiny.

From this day natural philosophy, and particularly chemistry, in the most comprehensive sense of the term, became nearly my sole occupation. I read with ardour those works, so full of genius and discrimination, which modern inquirers have written on these subjects. I attended the lectures and cultivated the acquaintance of the men of science of the university, and I found even in M. Krempe a great deal of sound sense and real information, combined, it is true, with a repulsive physiognomy and manners, but not on that account the less valuable. In M. Waldman I found a true friend. His gentleness was never tinged by dogmatism, and his instructions were given with an air of frankness and good nature that banished every idea of pedantry. In a thousand ways he smoothed for me the path of knowledge and made the most abstruse inquiries clear and facile to my apprehension. My application was at first fluctuating and uncertain; it gained strength as I proceeded and soon became so ardent and eager that the stars often disappeared in the light of morning whilst I was yet engaged in my laboratory.

As I applied so closely, it may be easily conceived that my progress was rapid. My ardour was indeed the astonishment of the students, and my proficiency that of the masters. Professor Krempe often asked me, with a sly smile, how Cornelius Agrippa went on, whilst M. Waldman expressed the most heartfelt exultation in my progress. Two years passed in this manner, during which I paid no visit to Geneva, but was engaged, heart and soul, in the pursuit of some discoveries which I hoped to make. None but those who have experienced them can conceive of the enticements of science. In other studies you go as far as others have gone before you, and there is nothing more to know; but in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder. A mind of moderate capacity which closely pursues one study must infallibly arrive at great proficiency in that study; and I, who continually sought the attainment of one object of pursuit and was solely wrapped up