Byron’s Frankenstein

Offered for sale from 26 September 2012 by bookseller Peter Harrington was Byron’s leather-bound copy of the first volume of the 1818 edition of Frankenstein, inscribed in Mary Shelley’s best copperplate handwriting, ‘To Lord Byron from the Author’. The opening of an exhibition the day before at Harrington’s, in Fulham Road, London, and a short lecture by Mary’s biographer Miranda Seymour, introduced the volume and publicised its sale ‘for offers in excess of £350,000’.

Young Sammy Jay, grandson of Douglas Jay (Lord Jay, who was President of the Board of Trade under Harold Wilson) spoke about how he had discovered the volume while sorting through his late grandfather’s library - his recent Oxford English degree enabling him to spot its importance despite its slightly forlorn appearance (its sister volumes II and III are missing). He told us how he and his step-grandmother had then carried the book through Oxford in his grandfather’s red ministerial box, to be authenticated by Richard Ovenden, Deputy Librarian at the Bodleian Library. The book was then exhibited with the original manuscript of Frankenstein at the New York Public Library in its exhibition, Shelley’s Ghost, during the early part of 2012.

In spite of the Bodleian’s authentication of Mary Shelley’s handwriting, there was some discussion among Romanticists at the event as to whether the item was genuine: could the very simple inscription have been forged, probably in the nineteenth century? The volume was not mentioned in the list of Byron’s books sold at RH Evans’s in Pall Mall on 6 July 1827, nor in the catalogue of the library of ‘A Gentleman Deceased’ sold by Evans on the same day, most of which Peter Cochran believes are also likely have been Byron’s (see ‘The Phantom Byron Book Sale Catalogue’ in this issue [pp. 49–55]).

However, as Cochran shows, the sale certainly did not constitute the entire contents of the ‘five boxes’ of Byron’s books that were sent to England after his death and were opened by his executors John Cam Hobhouse and John Hanson. This volume could easily have been kept by Hobhouse, or by John Murray or another of Byron’s friends or associates and then given away or sold later. And we know from a letter from Shelley to Byron of 28 April 1818 that Mary Shelley certainly did present Byron with a copy of Frankenstein. ‘I am commissioned by an old friend of yours to covey “Frankenstein” to you,’ Shelley wrote,

and I request that if you conjecture the name of the author, you will regard it as a secret. In fact, it is Mrs S’s’. It has met with considerable success in England; but she bids me say, “That she would regard your approbation as a more flattering testimony of its merit.”

Byron had also read (and given his approbation to) the novel by 15 May 1818, when he wrote to Murray:

Mary Godwin (now Mrs Shelley) wrote “Frankenstein” - which you have reviewed thinking it Shelley’s - methinks it is a wonderful work for a Girl of nineteen - not nineteen indeed - at that time.

Perhaps the strongest argument against the inscription having been forged in the nineteenth century (or before the many Frankenstein films of John Whale and others in the twentieth century) is that Mary Shelley and her novel were simply too little known or valued to be worth the forging. Byron’s name has always been a temptation to forgers, but even genuine Byron autographs changed hands for only a few pounds during most of this period. Harrington’s description of this volume as ‘perhaps the most evocative presentation copy conceivable in all nineteenth-century literature’ is one that could only have been written in the last twenty years or so, since Mary Shelley’s status has been immeasurably raised by her identification as a ‘founding mother’ of science fiction and as an object of feminist literary study. The print-run of the 1818 edition of Frankenstein was only 500, and ‘ordinary’ copies of this edition are now being offered for sale at £75...