When you're walking down a street in a

city you've never visited before, turn a

corner and suddenly, there's a friend of
yours from half a world away, that's a
coincidence. That kind of coincidence is
what we see in medieval romances. That
kind of coincidence is not what we see in
realistic novels because realistically
you'd never see your friend there. But, in
a romantic comedy people, meet cute all the
time, and in fact, lots of romantic things
do happen, some of them bad romantic
things where just the person you most
fear will materialize when you fear that
person's presence, romantic then both in
the happy sense and in the unhappy sense.
Romantic, heightened emotion. Romantic
coincidence. This happens actually in real
life. You might think - Mary Shelley what
kind of a woman was she to name the first
familial victim of the monster with the
name of her child who is beside her and
moribund. What kind of person could do
this? The answer is a romantic person.
It's worth taking a few moments to look at
the people involved in Mary Shelley's
production of Frankenstein and its
backgrounds to understand just how
romantic reality may sometimes be. Now,
Mary Shelley's mother was Mary
Wollstonecraft. Mary Wollstonecraft is one
of the most important early feminists. Her
"Vindication of the Rights of Women," 1792,
is at least of historical interest today,
and for some, still of philosophical
interest. She married William Godwin,
another important liberal voice in
England. He died in 1836, but he married
Mary Wollstonecraft in 1779. He wrote
"Inquiry Concerning Political Justice." If
you read the dedication page to
Frankenstein, you'll notice that that and
his novel "Caleb Williams" are both
mentioned when he is made the dedicatee of
the novel. The "Inquiry Concerning
Political Justice" argued for free love. It
argued for liberation. These two people,
William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft,
conceived between them a child, and Mary
Wollstonecraft Godwin was born in 1797,
coincidentally, the year of Mary
Wollstonecraft's death. She didn't die at
the moment of childbirth, but she died as
a consequence of that childbirth. Birth
and death are intimately linked in the
reality of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin's
life. Now, as you can tell from the
webpage that I've prepare for you to have
notes on this, in February 1815 Mary

Wollstonecraft Godwin gives birth to a

daughter to Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the daughter
dies. In January of 1816, the son William
is born. He dies in March of 1818. She
begins writing Frankenstein in June of
1816 by agreement with Shelley and Byron
and J.W. Polidori. In December of 1816,
Shelley's wife Harriet commits suicide. She
dies by throwing herself into a lake in a
park in London. The lake, for those of us
who remember the fall from the garden of
Eden, is coincidentally named the
Serpentine. Harriet throws herself into
the water and drowns. News of that reaches
Percy and Mary in Switzerland where they're on
retreat with Byron and Claire Claremont
and J.W. Polidori, and in response to
that, they marry. This is a romantic life
they're leading, not romantic in the sense
of, pitter-pat, pitter-pat, pitter-pat, but
extraordinarily heightened emotions,
extraordinary coincidences. In March of
1818 this story that was begun before the
marriage, went through the marriage, was
finally published. In March of 1818 Mary
Shelley in a sense gives birth to the book
Frankenstein. That's the same month, I
remind you, that William, in reality,
dies. It happens that Mary Shelley is also
important in the history of letters for
publishing a book called "The Last Man" in
1826. Frankenstein is in fact, the very
first book of its kind in the history of
the world. "The Last Man" is the first book
of its kind in English. It is a book, as
the title suggests, about someone who is
left alone in the world and has to try to
make his way. But, it is in fact informed
by Jean de Grainville's "The Last Man," from
1805, a French book. And the notion that
the world will be overgrown by human
activity, and thus will destroy all human
beings is already clear in Malthus'
famous essay on the "Principle of
Population," 1798, exactly the year of
"Lyrical Ballads," the beginning of the
romantic period. Percy Bysshe Shelley is,
of course, one of those five canonical
romantic poets, and becomes, of course,
ultimately the husband of Mary
Wollstonecraft Godwin. He dies by drowning
just as his first wife did, except in
his case it's not suicide, it's a capsized
boat. The boat is named the Ariel. Ariel,
of course, is the spirit of the air who
causes the shipwreck in "The Tempest," the
Tempest being raised by Ariel to
create the shipwreck so that the people
from Milan who have earlier abandoned
Prospero, the magician, and his daughter

Miranda, on a new world island, the

Bermuthes, can be brought there and tamed
somehow. In other words, Ariel is a spirit
of the air, under the power of a
scientific magician, who means to bring
society back together. And it's this Ariel
who causes the bad people in "The Tempest"
to drown, though some survive and come to
land, and it is the Ariel, the boat, that
Shelley loves, that brings him out into a
storm and has him drowned. Romantic
coincidences everywhere. Claire Claremont
is along on this trip. Claire Claremont is
Mary Shelley Godwin's stepsister because
she is the daughter of a Mrs. Claremont
who is William Godwin's second wife. Now,
Claire Clairmont has already by this time
born illegitimate children to Byron who is
also there. So, we have the free love and
the activity and the romance and
violation of taboos and all kinds of
coincidence. But the coincidence goes
further because Mrs. Clairmont, among her
other activities, was a publisher. And
what she published most famously for our
purposes was a book called "A Rough Outside
with a Gentle Heart." "A Rough Outside with
a Gentle Heart" seems to be a verse version,
published in 1811, fully seven years
before Frankenstein, of Beauty and the
Beast, that is someone who looks terrible
on the outside, but if only we would love
him, he would reveal his inner beauty and
be joined to community, exactly the
problem that Victor's monster deals with,
but no one comes to love him once they see
his outside. You can see the power of that
story. That story is published by Mrs.
Clairemont, the daughter of Mary Shelly's
stepsister. Madame de Beaumont was a woman
born in Rouen who came to England as a
servant. She managed to make her way in
the world by writing traditional fairy
stories from French into English, and she
eventually published a magazine and became
quite wealthy and took her money and went
off to Switzerland where she lived out her
life as a successful writer and business
woman. But, what she left behind in
English was the first English version of
Beauty and the Beast. Marriage, love,
inside, outside. I will be with you this
night. "I will be with you on your wedding
night," the monster tells Victor. And
Victor, egotist that he is, thinks the
monster means to be with Victor, when of
course, what he means to do is insert
himself in community. These figures have
to do with making the world into someplace
where coincidences can really happen. How

do you rule the world? The archetypal

figure who rules the world is Faust. Faust
is the doctor who makes the deal with the
devil, Mephistopheles, who serves him for
24 years, at the end of which time his
soul is carried off to hell. Now, in
Goethe's famous version, in fact, he's
redeemed by the love of a good woman. But
in Marlowe's version, the English version,
in fact, he goes down to hell in flames.
Christopher Marlowe might have been as
great a writer as Shakespeare, but he
didn't live long enough. Because, in
addition to being a playwright, he was a
spy for Queen Elizabeth, and he was
provoked into a fight, probably for
political reasons, in a bar one night and
stabbed through the eye and killed. Talk
about romantic coincidences. Now, the real
Johann Faust was a wandering German
conjurer, who lived at the end of the
fifteenth and the early sixteenth
centuries, and that conjurer did enough
trickery that other miracles were
magnetically attracted to him. There was
no real Dr. Faustus, of course. But, there
was the idea of Faust. And that wasn't the
only idea of making things whole. The
Jewish legend of the Golem, which centers
around Rabbi Judah of Loew. And his grave,
that is Rabbi Judah's, is still visible in
the old Jewish cemetery in Prague. He died
in 1609. He created a man of clay, as God
would. And then because he was a great,
great and holy man, he was able, according
to the way the legend is written, either
to inscribe the four letters that are
God's given name on the forehead of the
man of clay, or write them on a piece of
paper and insert them into his mouth and at
that point the golem arises to protect the
ghetto, to protect the Jews from the, the
people around them. This idea of taking
dead clay and animating it became a stock
part of German folklore. Take dead body
parts, put them together, take the new
science of Galvani, lightening coming down
and making dead frog's leg move, and
suddenly we have the golem in a modern
Faust, who is willing to give up his soul
in order to make some new extraordinary
discovery. These people have lives that
intertwined again and again. Although I
believe that the Faust behind Frankenstein
is Marlow's Faust, I can't help but
mention that Goethe, in addition to writing
Faust, wrote "The Sorrows of Young Werther." "The
Sorrows of Young Werther" is a story about a young
man who pines for the love of another, a
girl, and she chooses someone else. He

throws himself into a river, not the

serpentine, to commit suicide. This suicide
was so romantically popular, that for
quite a while after the publication of "The
Sorrows of Young Werther," people were found
who had committed suicide by drowning with
the characteristic yellow-covered book in
their pocket. It turns out that romantic
ideas take people over; they make us
change our minds. That's one of the
reasons that they're are so important to
us. But, even if we didn't try to make
things this way, sometimes, for some
people, romance intervenes. Wordsworth and
Coolridge published in 1798, so does
Malphus. There comes the end of the world,
here comes Mary Shelley writing about it.
She says that she was the only one of the
people who met to decide to write these
extra horror stories who finished her
work. But, in fact J.W. Polidori also
finished his. His 1819 book, "The Vampire"
is perhaps the first book of it's kind in
the English language, and it takes aim at
it's vampire Lord Ruthven Polidori. An
unappreciated immigrant Englishman makes
fun of an aristocratic Englishman in the
guise of a vampire. Irishman Bram Stoker,
while Ireland is still under the
domination of the English, attaches
himself to the most prominent actor of the
age, Henry Irving, and produces a vampire
story. Coincidence? Horace Walpole is the
youngest son of the first Prime Minister
of England. In 1797, Horace Walpole dies,
the same year that Mary Wollstonecraft
Godwin dies, the same year that Mary
Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley is born, and
in fact he creates the gothic novel, as I
mentioned in an earlier clip, "The Castle
of Otranto" in 1764. In 1764 Ann Radcliffe
is born and she writes "The Mysteries of
Udolpho," which is the greatest of all the
Gothic novels, setting the scheme for what
today we might call the Scooby Doo ending,
that is, as things become more and more
supernatural, we get the shock of the
fantastic again and again, until at the
very end, the final twist is to realize
that it wasn't supernatural at all, there was
a realistic explanation. That's a way to
keep the genre alive. Matthew Gregory
Lewis, known as Monk Lewis, published "The
Monk" in 1818, the same year that
Frankenstein came out. This is perhaps the
single classic example of all Gothic
literature with castles and abbeys and
monks and suicides and illegitimate
children, kinda like the life that Mary
Shelley and her group were actually

living. 1818, he dies. 1818, Frankenstein

is born. Sir Walter Scott, in 1818, writes
"The Heart of Midlothian," a great novel of
running across the Scots highlands, sort of
where Victor Frankenstein is going in
order to have the time and space to build
his monster. And in 1818 Jane Austen
publishes "Northanger Abbey," itself both a
satire of gothic literature and an
example of gothic literature. How can all
these books and lives and births and
deaths have the same date? How can they
all interconnect? Maybe after all, romance
is much closer to reality than we believe.
Certainly it was when Mary Shelley used it
to try to explore domestic affection and
universal virtue.