Here be monsters: Frankenstein & Dundee

In the preface to the 1831 edition of the novel which appeared under her own name, Mary paid fulsome tribute to the town: “the aerie of freedom … [where] the airy flights of my imagination were born and fostered.”

When one considers how soon after leaving Dundee the novel was written – little more than a year later, in the summer of 1816 at Byron’s lakeside villa in Geneva – clearly what she saw, felt and imagined while living in Dundee provided much of the background and possibly the theme of the novel.

Dundee, the then-whaling capital of the world was “Blubbertown”; the scale of its industry and rapacious plunder of the Arctic almost beyond belief. In Dundee’s docks Mary would have seen whale carcasses towed into harbour, carcasses of seals, walruses and polar bears by the thousand and vast piles of tusks and bones on the quays.

She would have seen the fires of huge vats boiling down blubber into tallow day and night, the piles of skins and jawbones, eyes, fins, organs and entrails on the docks while no doubt hearing many wild tales of the dangerous Arctic waters.

Mary Godwin, as she then was, travelled four times between the Thames and the Tay on the fast packet The Osnaburgh, and stayed with the family of David Baxter, a relatively poor branch of the Dundee Baxters’ industrial dynasty, who were friends – or co-religionists – of her father’s. Although their home, deprecatingly titled The Cottage, was a luxurious mansion, with extensive grounds, it was set on a slope only a couple of hundred yards away from, and overlooking, those frenetic docks.

She would have been ever aware of the vivid smells and noise of maritime industry; fish, burning tar, the coming and going of sailors and fishermen of many nationalities. Nor could she have been unaware of the hardship it entailed, the long separation of the whalers’ families.

The whaling men and their wives and sweethearts cut a ribbon in half and the men tied their halves to the masts. It must have been a sobering sight as the tall whaling ships sailed off on the tide with scores of these ribbons fluttering on the masthead. Mary would have absorbed it all; the smells and sounds, the emotion, the hardship and the hard lives, the ever-present risk of death.

As a dutiful attender at the Glasite Church in the town’s Cowgate, Mary would have been aware of the problems with Resurrectionists – body-snatchers – supplying fresh corpses to the surgeons of Edinburgh who were pioneering surgical techniques. Cadavers were in short supply – only hanged men’s corpses could be used, so there was a nationwide trade in grave-robbing. A Sexton and gravedigger of the Howff cemetery, called Geordie Mill, was one of those under suspicion, whether based on evidence or on simple jealousy of his wealth.

At the time Mary was in Dundee watchtowers had been built into many of the larger graveyards and the graves of the wealthy secured with mort-safes. For a girl evidently predisposed to ghoulish notions this was of interest. With the Baxter girls, she crossed the river to visit the home of David Booth, a member of the congregation who had married the oldest daughter, and spent many an hour exploring the crumbling 12th-century Gothic ruins of nearby Lindores Abbey.

Mary and she and Isabella Baxter scratched their names in a landing window there. Later, Christy Baxter returned to London with her – and they both encountered Percy Shelley – and then they came back up together.

Staying for such lengthy periods in Dundee perhaps created the inevitability that when Mary wrote a novel it would be partly set in Scotland. That might come as a surprise to those who have forgotten the novel or never read it at all. There is an ambivalence in the novel as to why Victor Frankenstein is in Scotland. Is he attempting to evade his creature and shirk his promise to create a female partner for him? Or i s it because he imagines he can better get privacy to do that ghoulish work? Or is it because in Scotland there is more scope for monstrous surgery, more easy availability of body parts?

“ … we received a letter from a person in Scotland who had formerly been our visitor in Geneva. He asked us … to prolong our journey as far north as Perth, where he resided … we left Edinburgh in a week, passing through Coupar (sic), St Andrews and along the banks of the Tay to Perth … ”

That both the scientist, and the creature trailing him at a distance, pass therefore within sight of Dundee conveys a satisfying sense of the author’s homage to the town which gave her so much atmosphere and delicious Gothic inspiration and freedom to imagine.

BUT Dundee must not overstate its claim. When Mary was eight, she was in the room when a friend of her parents, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, gave an early reading of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. For a bookish girl, in an age before films and videos, when the spoken word was paramount, that must have been an overwhelming experience.

The poem is quoted in the pages of Frankenstein, which is, after all, based on the key concept of “journey” that it shares with that poem. The novel is a quest, a ceaselessly roaming narrative of travel without rest and that is true for all three of the main protagonists; the explorer Walton, whose letters frame the novel, Victor Frankenstein and his “monster”. And Mary was sensitive and acutely aware of the fine line between life and death.

The world she inhabited in London in and around her father’s shop was a dangerous place of all-too-evident mortality. Her mother had succumbed to puerperal fever and died just eleven days after giving birth to her. Many of her sisters and step-sisters did not survive; all around her was death and tragedy. Perhaps reflecting that brief transition, the creature comes into existence within the span of a single sentence in the novel.

“It was already one in the morning … when I saw the dull yellow eye of the monster open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.”

This occurs in an ordinary room at the top of a house, rather than the sci-fi subterranean laboratory of the 1931 film. The novel is tragedy, the film, according to Halliwell’s Film Companion, “perfect camp”, nevertheless, hugely influential, spawning numerous serials and risible follow-ups that made box-office millions. But in all the lumbering “otherness” conferred upon audiences, the point of the novel was overlooked.

It was in Dundee that Mary’s Gothic imagination was nurtured, where she first saw monsters and learned of dangerous journeys to distant places, passed from being a bookish and pale child into a bold adventurer and fearless traveller. Her life was never easy and following the publication of Frankenstein, Mary suffered the death of her one-year-old daughter in Venice in September and the following June, the death of her three-year-old son.

To distract her from these travails, she wrote a second novel, Mathilde, which is possibly her most autobiographical work. Narrated on her deathbed to a talented young poet, (based on Percy Shelley), Mathilde, raised by a severe aunt near Loch Lomond, relates a grim story of her father’s incestuous desire for her and jealousy of her suitors – and his suicide. Mary’s father was so disgusted by this manuscript that he confiscated it. It was finally published posthumously in 1959, the last of her seven novels to appear.

As a postscript, it could be noted the cottage where Mary had stayed was demolished in 1831, the very year the new edition of the novel appeared, and in 1931, exactly 100 years later, the Royalty Kinema built in its former grounds, was showing James Whale’s black and white film Frankenstein! Scottish readers will also find a resonance in the “fade to white” ending of the novel.

The reviled monster, acutely lonely, sets out onto the Arctic ice, resolved to die. This is eerily familiar to Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated end in the Antarctic after sailing there in the Dundee-built whaler, Terra Nova, exactly 100 years after Mary first arrived in Dundee. Frankenstein’s monster may not have been created in Dundee, but the poor creature certainly had a passing knowledge of the place.

This feature expands upon my contribution to Billy Kay’s Frankenstein Dundee, which is scheduled for broadcast on BBC Radio Scotland on September 4 at 13.32