Mary Shelley and the Scottish Gothic Tradition

Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' can lay claim to being the world's most influential novel. There are thousands of sequels and spinoffs, as well as all sorts of imitations. There are also comic books, plays, costumes, movies and merchandise devoted to Victor Frankenstein and his creature.

Its enduring legacy is always around us, even in the language we use. Frankenscience, Frankenfoods, and related words commonly pop up in scientific journals and newspapers. Film historians routinely describe popular movies as "Frankensteinian", such as 'Bladerunner', 'Robocop', and 'Jurassic Park'.

In the introduction to the 1831 edition of 'Frankenstein', Shelley bid her "hideous progeny" go forth and prosper. Indeed, it has – especially over the past half-century as films, TV shows and other media have expanded the story.

In the 1930s, Boris Karloff was the walking-but-not-quite-talking embodiment of the monster in James Whale's 'Frankenstein' (1931). Nearly a century later, his iconic portrayal in that film and beyond has eclipsed the book version of the creature for many. But it now contends with parodies, pastiches, and reworkings in every conceivable type of textual and visual representation.

Copies of 'Frankenstein' are available in virtually all libraries and bookshops in the world and in almost any language. It may be placed in the classics section, alongside novels by other globally recognised authors of the nineteenth century, like Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott. Or it may take pride of place in the horror section, alongside 'Dracula' or 'The Shining'. You might even find it lurking in the children's section, in the form of one of many shorter or illustrated versions designed for younger readers.

The National Library of Scotland alone has 106 versions of the book. Incidentally, just across the road from the Library you will find a Frankenstein-themed pub, with a looming effigy of the creature in the doorway, one of many found throughout the world.

We might call Frankenstein a modern mythical figure. Or, maybe, he's a composite myth built out of others, including the legends of Faust and Prometheus. Like these, Frankenstein seeks forbidden knowledge. For this transgression, he is harshly punished. But Frankenstein's misdeed is not typical. He defies moral norms not so he can live forever but rather to create life. Combining human and animal parts into one large body, Frankenstein achieved the impossible: he galvanises dead matter. Much to the creator's alarm, however, the creature demonstrates high intelligence despite his repulsive appearance. In turn, the creature is aghast at the human frailties he discovers in books, the bible and Milton's Christian epic 'Paradise Lost' among them.

Above all, the creature longs for a companion of his own kind, with whom he will abscond to America and live off the land. Initially, Frankenstein agrees to create the female creature. He sets up a makeshift laboratory on a small, unnamed island in Orkney, having conducted further research in Edinburgh, a major seat of scientific knowledge in the period.

Alarmed by the possibility that the new creature will bear little monsters, or worse, lust after mankind, Frankenstein destroys her before she can draw breath. Watching through the window, the male creature howls in grief. He issues a fatal warning to his maker: he will seek revenge on everyone he loves. Frankenstein's downfall comes quickly. Shortly after he flees Orkney, he is arrested in Ireland on the accusation of murder. Later, the creature kills Frankenstein's bride, Elizabeth.

The Orcadian scene is brief but evidently potent. Many of the twenty-first-century retellings of the story have revived Frankenstein's attempt at creating a woman. Indeed, ever since James Whale centred his sequel to 'Frankenstein' on the eponymous 'Bride of Frankenstein' (1935), artists and writers in different media have been fascinated with Elsa Lanchester's on-screen portrayal of the hissing, mute monster.

Before we look at some of these modern reworkings, we must first understand why Scotland mattered so much to Mary Shelley. Then we can consider Shelley's position in the Scottish Gothic tradition.

A former resident of Dundee as a young girl, Mary Shelley (then known as Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin) was deeply impacted by Scotland and its people throughout her long career. Among her lesser-known works we find a clever historical novel, 'The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck' (1830). This features both James IV and James III (the latter in flashback), among other Scottish figures. 'The Last Man' (1826), an apocalyptic novel set in the late twenty-first century, is partly located in Perth and Dunkeld. Indeed, it is only the banks of the River Tay that provide shelter to the main characters as they flee the disease that tears the world apart.

But it is her masterpiece, 'Frankenstein' (1818), in which we find the most extensive literary engagement with the Scottish landscape. This includes a desolate and barely inhabited Orkney, where Victor Frankenstein is tasked with creating life out of dead matter - again. There is a profound, fitting irony here. Scientific creativity occurs in a place he associates with destruction and decay.

This markedly Gothic sense of creation, reforming life out of death, takes a personal turn in the author's retrospective account of her residency in central Scotland as a teenager. In the introduction to the 1831 edition of 'Frankenstein', Shelley mentions the "considerable time" she spent in Scotland, making an unspecified number of "occasional visits to the more picturesque parts".

But her main stay (her "habitual residence", as she puts it) in 1812 was "on the blank and dreary northern shores of the Tay, near Dundee". The gothicism of her language is clear enough ("blank", "dreary"). However, she hastens to clarify that such dreariness leads to profound flights of fancy. "They were the eyry of freedom, and the pleasant region where unheeded I could commune with the creatures of my fancy". And she was already writing here, however unsuccessfully, by her own estimation: "I wrote then—but in a most common-place style".

More indirectly, her engagement with her Scottish locale fired her burgeoning inventiveness: "It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered".

For Shelley, Scotland is Gothic: sublime and full of terrors and wonders. If we were to map out literary tourism across Scotland, Shelley's Dundee would take pride of place. Much of the immediate sites of interest have disappeared. For example, the large cottage in which she lived with William Thomas Baxter and his family was bulldozed decades ago. The woods in which she roamed and wrote have gone. The plague pits have long been cemented over. The docks in which she would have witnessed the hubbub of stories and intrigue are now less lively.

And yet, we can follow her invisible steps across some significant spaces that would have fired her eerie imagination. The Howff (a sixteenth-century cemetery) and the banks of the silvery Tay, as well as the Glasite church in which the Baxters prayed, would have been her regular haunts. And lingering local legends of witches and dragons would have reached her impressionable young ears.

'Frankenstein' remains a mainstay of the Gothic tradition in a general sense, and specifically in connection with Scotland. We therefore might also place Shelley's most famous novel alongside other Gothic works by Scottish authors.

Walter Scott is best remembered as one of the earliest pioneers of historical fiction. The Edinburgh Waverley train station is a rare example of a public transport hub named after a literary character, the hero of Scott's first Jacobite novel, 'Waverley' (1814). And the nearby Scott Monument remains the world's largest statuary commemoration of an author.

But Scott also revelled in the Gothic. He wrote one of the first ghost stories in English, 'The Tapestried Chamber', among other macabre pieces. One of his most celebrated novels, 'Redgauntlet' (1824), includes a story within it called 'Wandering Willie's Tale'. It is replete with devilment and dark turns. His large library at Abbotsford is still filled with books on witchcraft and the supernatural.

Even one of Scott's most famous historical novels, 'Ivanhoe' (1819), is haunted by the Gothic. The dedicatory letter that opens the book is addressed to the fictional antiquary Dr Dryasdust. Scott (as Laurence Templeton) mentions a "Scottish magician" who was "at liberty to walk over the recent field of battle, and to select for the subject of resuscitation by his sorceries, a body whose limbs had recently quivered with existence, and whose throat had but just uttered the last note of agony". Such a figure no doubt emerged out of his recent reading of 'Frankenstein', a novel he reviewed with great enthusiasm in 'Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine' a few months earlier.

Another major Scottish contemporary of Shelley and Scott was James Hogg, who retains a cult following among writers today. Hogg wrote prolifically in poetry and prose, but is perhaps best remembered for his twice-told tale, 'The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner' (1824).

This is another staple of the classics shelf of your favourite library or bookshop. Like 'Frankenstein', 'Justified Sinner' draws us into a world of madness and immorality. Also like 'Frankenstein' and a highly influential novella that came out later in the century, 'Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' (1886), it centres on doppelgangers, or doubles. Good and evil lurks in all of us, no matter how much we try to externalise the latter.

In the Scottish Gothic tradition ('Frankenstein' included), it is not always clear where those lines can be drawn, if at all.

In a time of continued pandemics, no doubt, Shelley's plague fiction, 'The Last Man', will gain new admirers. And Shelley's many Gothic tales might pick up their own followers. 'Transformation' is a particularly unsettling piece, in which an arrogant youth foolishly swaps bodies with a shipwrecked imp. But more certainly 'Frankenstein' will continue to inspire artists and writers from around the world.

Of particular interest seems to be the aborted woman storyline. Three recent spinoffs elaborate in detail the pre-story here, giving us fleshed-out women doomed to die at the hands of a manic Victor Frankenstein. These are Victor Kelleher's 'Born of the Sea' (2003), Kate Horsley's 'The Monster's Wife' (2014) and Tim McGregor's 'Eynhallow' (2024). Even a passing knowledge of the Orcadian scene in the source material will set up horrific payoffs for their readers.

Adaptations and spinoffs of 'Frankenstein' have been appearing in ever greater numbers for decades. Arguably the most innovative has been Alasdair Gray's 'Poor Things' (1992), which was recently adapted for the big screen. Like Hogg's 'Justified Sinner', it is a twice-told tale. First we have the perspective of Archibald McCandles, a Scottish Public Health Officer, and then second we have his wife Victoria (also known as Bella Baxter). Victoria/Bella may or not be a Frankenstein-like Bride, and her creator/father may or may not be Godwin (God) Baxter. It depends on whose account you believe. Both come couched in extensive notes and with different types of textual and visual evidence.

Certainly, 'Poor Things' toys not only with the Frankenstein myth but with what we might call the Mary Shelley story. The allusions to real people from her life and legend are clear (Godwin Baxter is a composite of her father, William Godwin, and her host in Dundee, William Thomas Baxter). Nothing is more Gothic than the life and legend of that adopted Dundonian, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, after all.

Professor Daniel Cook holds a Personal Chair in English and Scottish Literature at the University of Dundee. He is the author of 'Frankenstein Retold' and 'Gulliver's Afterlives' (both forthcoming from Bloomsbury), as well as 'Walter Scott and Short Fiction' (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), among other books. An expert on Gothic literature, he is particularly interested in Mary Shelley and her connections with Scotland.

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