by Stella Mcintyre

Created on: April 23, 2009

Many of the people surrounding Mary Shelley were advocates of Republicanism and had been supporters of the American and French Revolutions. Mainstream publications and conservative spokespersons at the time vilified those who were seen as dangerous radicals, including William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. There was fear and hysteria over the possibility of an attack from France and more so over the possibility of a similar revolution in England. Supporters of political change through violent revolution were called Jacobins. Such was the anxiety that there was a publication called the Anti-Jacobin Review. Mary's husband, Percy Shelley was a keen supporter of many Jacobin ideas.

There is little surprise then, given Mary's parentage and marriage, that Frankenstei can be read as an analogy for revolution and an exploration of its genesis and denouement.
The early Romantics, including Coleridge, had hoped that the French Revolution would act as a catalyst in bringing nearer the fulfillment of their millennial dreams. The reality of the French Revolution, in its "monstrous" bloodletting and vengeance, led many Romantics to turn away from revolution and Republicanism towards a concern for individual psychology as a means of creating a heaven on earth. They felt that the rationalistic approach to the attainment of knowledge, emphasized by the tenets of the Enlightenment, isolated man from the natural world and therefore away from a paradisiacal communion with nature.
Mary Shelley was acquainted with Coleridge through his friendship with Godwin and was aware of the revolutionary aspects of Romanticism through her association with Percy Shelley.
There is evidence to suggest that Percy Shelley saw the fermentation of ideas amongst groups of intellectuals spread across national boundaries, as a means of recreating the utopian ideals which had been damaged by the failure of the French Revolution.

In Richard Holmes, "The Pursuit" we read:
"The idea of worldwide revolution constantly recurred
to Shelley in moments of optimism throughout his
life, and he eventually incorporated it in his theory
of evolution of liberty through human history.
Worldwide revolution was also one of the secret
Articles of the Illuminists."
The Illuminists were the secret international Jacobin society, dedicated to world-wide revolutionary conspiracy, founded by Adam Weishaupt, in Ingolstadt in May 1776. It is interesting to note that Victor Frankenstein studies at and created his creature at university

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• Next Page >>