As I learned years later, Ross fulfilled his humanitarian charge. The letters entrusted to him-nay, my copies of those letters-he delivered to Mrs Saville, a neighbour of the Godwins in Holburn, on his trip home to Kirkcaldy. Later, in a quest for solace, Mrs Saville passed them along to a member of that family, either to peruse and destroy or to bring out under the imprimatur of M. J. Godwin & Co.
Ross had told Wilton ’s sister that he had received the copied letters from a giant much resembling the creature delineated therein. Mrs Saville, knowing the handwriting for a good but imperfect forgery of her brother’s, rejected the Scotsman’s tale and his letters as a cruel hoax. She had long ago deduced, and resigned herself to the fact, of Captain Walton’s death. For his part, William Godwin, author of Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and the novel Caleb Williams, could not steel himself either to destroy or to publish the peculiar manuscript passed along to him by his second wife, the erstwhile Mary Jane Clairmont.
Almost by default, the letters fell into the keeping of the adolescent Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, a young woman of enormous wit, independence, and energy. She regarded Walton’s letters as a cabalistic document of Promethean consequence. Even before her “elopement” to the Continent with the married poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, in the summer of 1814, she had struggled to shape a readable story from these materials. Almost four years later, having reworked and abridged my copies of the letters, Mary allowed them, with more revisions by her husband, to appear anonymously in three small volumes from the little-regarded publishing house of Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones.
Some literary historians have contended that this “novel” burst upon the world without an acknowledged author because Mrs Shelley feared either that reviewers would never believe a woman her age the originator of such a brutal and abhorrent tale or that her notoriety as a wanton and unorthodox, even anarchic, female would poison its reception and sales. I offer a simpler reason for the absence of the author’s name from the title page: Mrs Shelley, though she introduced certain clarifying changes into the manuscript, neither conceived the story nor wrote it. The text of Frankenstein indisputably reveals its author to be the late Robert Walton. On the other hand, because that text consists largely of my creator’s partisan recitation of his own biography, even Walton deserves little credit beyond that due any conscientious scribe or amanuensis. In a sense, the book’s title simultaneously reveals its author. Why, then, would a person of Mrs Shelley’s talent and probity wish to recommend herself as the fountainhead of this monstrous story?
Initially, of course, she did not. Later, however, when the book created a nationwide stir, prompting a writer in Blackwood’s to put forward his sincere wishes for the putative author’s “future happiness,” thereby forgiving Mrs Shelley her unconventional past, it became harder to insist upon her role as an editor and ever more tempting to embrace the work as wholly the product of her own philosophical musings and storytelling proclivities. In 1831, this temptation led her to elaborate upon her husband’s mood-setting fiction of the ghost-story-writing competition at the Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816. Further, she irrevocably acknowledged authorship of Frankenstein by allowing the publishers of the revised edition of 1832 to feature prominently on its title page her name. Perhaps the fact that in the fourteen years between the two editions she had published three novels of her own, along with many accomplished incidental writings, effectively obscured for her the actual genesis of the work. Mrs Shelley suffered much in her heroic life, from the high-minded betrayals of her most cherished loved ones as well as from the untimely deaths of her husband and all but one of her children. Thus, I do not anathematise her for claiming unassisted creatorship of the one title-The Last Man, fine as it is, does not qualify-that enrolled her among the immortals.
Quitting Janalach, I blessedly had no foreknowledge of the events that would carry my distorted biography to the world. I wished only to atone for the crimes of my past life and to discover in my second incarnation a place of at least marginal acceptance. The necessity to hide, to make certain salubrious changes in myself as well as discreet contacts among the tribespeople of the ice coasts and the taiga, required discipline and fortitude. I hiked east, sustaining myself on lichens, bog moss, and the leaves and spring fruit of several different kinds of stunted shrubs. I made skis of larchwood and built myself a movable blind of mammoth bones and evergreen foliage. The blind enabled me to skirt the encampments of nomads, and the fluid edges of reindeer herds, without betraying to either man or beast my presence in or near their environs.
After several months’ travel and the overmastering of many hardships, however, two Chukchi hunters caught me traversing a barren expanse of tundra and let fly at me from their compound bows a barrage of arrows. That I dragged a travois and attired myself as a human being enraged rather than conciliated them. I had trespassed their demense, and my size convicted me as a likely scourge of their hunting grounds.
Two arrows struck home, their walrus-ivory points embedding themselves in my flesh, one above my hip and the other in my calf. I roared bitterly. I menaced the bowmen with broad semaphoring gestures. Uncowed, they muttered unintelligibly, perhaps disappointedly, before retreating out of sight beyond a fluted sastruga.
Thus abandoned, I sought to minister to my wounds. I snapped off the arrow shafts and removed my leggings to expose the embedded points. In this half-naked state, I would have presented a prodigiously vulnerable target, had my Chukchi tormentors returned with reinforcements. I made haste, then, to dislodge the ivory barbs with the tip of a skinning knife. The pain was slight, but a copious oozing of pale blood accompanied this surgery. With spruce resin and rags I dressed my wounds. Then, lame and sore, I drew on my leggings and retreated several miles to an orphaned copse of cedars. Therein I erected a hut of branches and sailcloth in which to mull my outcast state and to recoup my vigour.
This recoupment, although at the time I hardly knew it, protracted into a hibernation akin to my death sleep in the ice cavern far to the west. A blizzard stormed and departed. The twilit autumn turned to night. I may have had some imperfect consciousness of time’s passage, but in my womblike shelter, the lashing of the sleet, the lamentations of the wind, and the brink starlight strewn above the grove chimed in me as inward rather than outer phenomena. In my stupefaction I reposed much as a salmon, stunned by the cuff of a bear and twitching on a rock, would nonetheless intuit its fate.
Eventually, I awoke to ice, snow, and uncouth Aeolian music. My wounds had healed. Revitalised, I fought clear of my wintry entombment and journeyed again towards the Utopia of my innocent fancy…
At dinner, Curriden griped Kizzy’d put baking soda instead of baking powder into her biscuits. (Or vice versa.) They looked like “baby cow flops” and tasted like “carbon-paper ashes.”
“Mrs Lorrows has had an off day,” Jumbo defended her.
“Uh-uh,” Kizzy said. “But I sometimes has a tumble day when the likes of yall jabbers yo ugly spite.”
“Mr Curriden has had an off day too,” Jumbo said.
“These biscuits could drop an ox,” Curriden said. “From the inside or out, eaten or thrown.”