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- [00:00]
Progressive Insurance Ad
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- [00:21]
Kristen Bell
Hi, I'm Kristen Bell and if you know my husband Dax, then you also know he loves shopping for a car. Selling a car, not so much.
- [00:28]
Dax Shepard
We're really doing this, huh?
- [00:29]
Kristen Bell
Thankfully, Carvana makes it easy. Answer a few questions, put in your van or license and done. We sold ours in minutes this morning and they'll come pick it up and pay us this afternoon.
- [00:40]
Genevieve Manion
Bye bye Truckee.
- [00:41]
Kristen Bell
Of course we kept the favorite.
- [00:45]
Dax Shepard
Hello other Truckee.
- [00:46]
Kristen Bell
Sell your car with Carvana today. Terms and conditions apply.
- [00:53]
Genevieve Manion
Hello and welcome to My Victorian Nightmare. I'm your host Genevieve Manion and I'm here to talk about mysterious deaths, morbid fascinations, disturbing stories, and otherwise spooky events from the Victorian era. Because to me there's just something especially intriguing, creepy and oddly comforting about horror and mayhem from the 19th century. So listener discretion is advised. Hello friends and welcome to this, my 53rd episode. I hope that you had a glittering week. Mine was quite overwhelming. I woke up last Monday and like I do every morning, I blindly slap around my side table for my glasses to look at my phone to check if any disasters happened while I was asleep as you do. And I found that more people joined the fan coven by 9am than I thought were gonna join all month. I don't think I have ever woken up and just started crying within like 10 seconds before. Apart from like the last time I was teething. I simply couldn't believe it. And that's when the dread kicked in. I was full of dread because I thought that only like 50 people tops would subscribe and much more subscribed than that. So I've run out of the super cool things that I collected for your presents, but never fear, I have ordered all new super cool things. It's just going to take about another week or so to receive some of the custom made things, but everyone who has subscribed and does subscribe between now and August 18th will receive a personal gift. It just might take a little longer to get to than I had planned, so I am very sorry for the delay. Incidentally, when you join the Fan Coven you will receive this show ad free. You will receive my audiobook where to Begin about how to begin an eclectic witchcraft practice, as well as monthly witchy content, meditations, ritual guides, and affirmations that coincide with notable celestial transits. I've mentioned numerous times just how important this practice has been in regards to this show itself, how I've used it to help me find my voice, how I use it to help myself to focus, help me find inspiration, and help me to turn wheels that need to turn to keep reaching more listeners. Like you, the practice has also been instrumental in helping me maintain my mental health. I have discussed how I have struggled with anxiety and depression throughout my life. This practice keeps me centered, grounded, connected to a center. It allows me to invite my demons to tea and get to know them in ways that other practices have not. So if you are looking for a practice that makes it easier to pal around with your demons rather than just allowing them to run amok on their own while also making sure that you do not miss any opportunity to pal around with your sweetest spirits too, you may enjoy what is offered. Just go to myvictorianightmare.com to find out more. Starting this show and making it a full time job was a terribly unhinged and reckless thing to do. I have always played things as safely as I could in my life and I have had to put everything on the line to do this thing that I love. And so your support means more to me than you could know. It is such a gift. So thank you. Oh and I just want to say of the number of very cool things that you will be getting in your welcome present you will find a super cool raven skull necklace and it's very long because I personally like to either wrap it around my neck three times and make like a super sexy goth choker out of it or you can wear it long and only like wrap it around your neck once or twice. You just have to tie it in a bow in the back. It doesn't have a clasp. A bow keeps it secure. Just want to be sure folks know that that isn't just some crazy 3 foot random leather string with a skull tied to it for no reason. Also, I included home dried orange slices. I held every single one of these to my heart and I filled them with support for you in your practice. Orange is used in witchcraft to represent abundance and joy, so I thought that might be a nice little object to include for your altar if you wish to use it.
- [05:53]
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- [06:22]
Genevieve Manion
Okay for you today, dear Listener, I will be discussing one of my most requested topics. Today we will meet Queen Mary Shelley, the mother of science fiction, the mother of gothic horror. I will discuss her life, which was so full of tragedy, poetic romance, monsters, graveyard sex. This woman's existence was one of the darkest things I have ever researched and luckily it kind of ends with a little stability. But first, it is time for our weekly segment With Their Own Eyes, where I share with you the personal haunting accounts of petrified Victorians. And yet again we will be returning to the boarding house of horrors at 131 W. 14th St. In 1881, two spectral lodgers wreaked havoc in landlady Mrs. Carr's boarding house, strewing her inhabitants asunder, screaming into the night down the streets of Manhattan, never to return again. Chambermaid's terrified holy water sprinkled. Virtually no one could escape the spectral mustached, side whiskered terror of one of these ghosts. Especially it seems that menacing mustache is mentioned at least eight times in this article. So let's check back in with a gentleman lodger by the name of Mr. Pierre and hear his personal account of the black eyed, sinisterly mustached specter of 131 W. 14th St. The article reads, Mr. Pierre, who has a room in the house now, brought to mind an adventure which he had had with a ghost and related it to Officer Kling. He said that he sat in his room reading one night a short time ago, when he thought he heard footsteps ascending the stairs. He looked up and saw standing at his door a tall man with side whiskers and mustache and large black eyes, dressed in a black coat and light pantaloons. The figure then disappeared, and he fancied that he heard it running up the stairs, but he could not say what became of it as he went on with his reading and took no more notice of it. After the scene of Tuesday night, the inmates of the house were in mortal terror, and Officer Chapman induced Mr. Harry Pay Payne, formerly advertising agent of Haverly's 14th Street Theater, to remain in the house and watch for the ghosts. On Wednesday night, Mr. Payne went to the house and began his vigil with Mrs. Carr and some of the servants. At about 2 o' clock yesterday morning, no ghost having appeared, and the company in general being afflicted with an attack of yawning Mr. Payne concluded to take a little nap and so to be fresh for the encounter with the ghost when it should suit his convenience to appear. Leaving the others in the basement, he mounted to the fourth story and entered one of the bedrooms. There was no lock to the door, and in order to know whether it had been disturbed during his sleep, he tied one end of a piece of string to the knob and pinned the other end lightly to the wall. Then he lay down on the outside of the bed with his clothes on, grasping his trusty whipstock in his hand. He had fallen into a light sleep when suddenly he felt two large hands pounce on his two ankles and his legs were thrown to the floor. He made an effort to rise and bring his whipstock into play, but he was not quick enough. As he raised his his arm to strike, he saw what appeared to be a solid shadow pass rapidly through the open door and disappear. He rushed out into the hall and searched every part of it, but could find no sign of his rude and mysterious visitor. That was the last appearance of the male ghost to date. The ghost had taken an unusual course. Instead of passing through the wall or coming through the roof. Roof. He had opened the door to gain an entrance and the string hung dangling from the knob. Okay. My first impulse was to think maybe this is no mustache ghost at all, but some mustached alive dude. In bits of the article in past episodes that I've read, it's mentioned that a few times cops came to the house to inspect that when it was locked, no one could come in or out. So it couldn't have been an intruder that was repeatedly harassing tenants nightly. But they didn't consider that it could be a weirdo hiding in the walls. Wouldn't be the first time that a weirdo hid in the walls and scared the freckles off of folks. But then my next thought was ghosts have been known to open doors before. In fact, it's a common occurrence according to many people who believe their homes are haunted, specifically by poltergeists. Let's talk about them for a minute. Ghosts, spirits of departed dead and can have no ill will. They may just waft about and at times you may sense them. They may even try to make contact. But a poltergeist is different than your bog standard ghost. It has a very specific motive. It's to cause disruptions, knock things around, make noise and get an emotional response out of you. The word is derived from the German poltern, which means to make noise, and geist, which means ghost. So noisy Jerk of a ghost. Demons are also capable of this behavior. So if you have events like doors opening themselves with no plausible explanation other than a spooky situation or perhaps yanking you by the damn ankles out of your bed, you might be in trouble. Get out of that house. Or at the very least, do not look in the mirror when you go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Demons live in the mirrors and want you to look at them, which helps them to breach containment and enter into the realm of the living. We've been over this ad nauseam. Just stop drinking fluids before like 6pm and you could avoid this entire demonic scenario. That is my advice to you. Okay. Won't you now follow me into the seance room where I share with you goings on in the Spiritualist society of the 1800s. Before we get to Mary Shelley, I have three fabulous little depositions in of mediumistic talents described in this spiritualist newspaper from 1869 to share with you. And I continue to learn new things from this fabulous publication about the abilities of mediums of the time. And this first one reads, Signor Damani. A Sicilian gentleman residing at Clifton, Bristol, said that at Mrs. Mary Marshall's, who did not know him, a spirit had communicated to him professing to be his sister. He replied that he never had a sister of her name. The spirit answered that he was mistaken. Accordingly, he wrote to his mother, then in Sicily, and learned that a sister of that name had died in infancy. The spirits, he said, are good, bad and indifferent as upon earth, and some of them are ragamuffins. I continue. Mr. Daniel D. Home, in the course of his deposition, said that once his body was elongated about 8 inches. When Lord Adair had hold of his head and the master of Lindsay had hold of his feet, he had seen a pencil lifted by a spirit hand write on paper in the presence of the Emperor Napoleon. This took place in a large room, the Salon Louis Quince. The Empress was also present. The hand, after writing, went to the Emperor, who kissed it and then went to the Empress. She withdrew from the touch and the hand followed her. And finally Ms. Anna Blackwell of the Avenue de l', Eau, Paris deposed that at her. Her seances they always begin with a prayer. Once at Mr. S.C. hall's, the spirit said, pay attention and we will show you how we form things out of the air. They watched and presently they saw the air become thick fog, like in one spot. And then it became solidified into cloth. That cloth was passed around, examined, pulled and with seen to be such a piece of cloth as might be sewn on trousers. It was then put down and gradually melted away into thin air. I very much appreciate the reminder that some spirits are simply ragamuffins and should be regarded as such. And yet again, another wild talent that mediums claimed to possess in this era, the ability to elongate their bodies. I wish I understood the spiritual significance of this. Communicating with the dead somehow enabled you to stretch your body like a long boy kitty cat. I'm gonna have to do more digging on the significance of this. And the cloth manifestation is so fascinating. Like either all of these people are not telling the truth, or some shyster was able to conjure a a thick fog indoors and bait and switch cloth out of the air that disintegrated, or a medium simply manifested fabric out of the very air. I've said it before and I'll say it again. If I had a time machine and I only had one thing that I could do with it, I wouldn't go see Black Sabbath in the 60s, although I would struggle with that choice. Oh rest sweet Liazi Prince of Darkness. I would go to a seance in the 1860s. I would want to see for myself what these folks were whipping up. I feel like it would creep me out so much that I would turn completely inside out. I will just have to continue to read the spiritualist newspaper and use it to paint my fondest nightmares. We shall return to the seance room again next week.
- [17:20]
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- [17:49]
Genevieve Manion
My main references for today's episode is a frontporchrepublic.com article by David Bannon and a wikipedia.com article. All of my other resources can be found in the show Notes okay, let's talk about the Queen of Darkness, Mary Shelley. I've been reluctant to do a show on her because frankly, I'm not a big monster fan. I love spooky movies, but Frankenstein doesn't really fit into my spooky sweet spots. I'm more of a ghosty, eerie, demony, supernaturally spooky movie girl. Not too into zombies or werewolves. And the only reason that I'm into Vampires is because their stories are often tied in some way to the Victorian era. Not always, but that's what their allure is. For me personally, I'm also not a huge science fiction fan. I don't like most things. But the more research that I did about Mary Shelley herself, and not just her monster, the more interested in her I became. Her life plays out like a horror movie, a devastating one. Mary's Frankenstein story about creating life from death is an exercise in grief, with all of its helplessness, regret, anger, terror and abandonment states that Mary often lived in, very often lived in. And rather than collapse under the weight of so much death, so much unimaginable tragedy, she chose to turn her pain into a masterpiece. She chose to sit closely to the ghosts of her many lost family members and friends. She didn't turn away from the horror of human existence. She turned fully toward it and spun it like a silken web into poetry. So let's discuss her life and the events and experiences that culminated in a horrific masterwork, and the woman who loved so deeply and lived so fully in such a dark time. Mary was born on 30 August 1797 in London to women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft and her father, anarchist political philosopher William Godwin. Her mother subscribed to the radical notion that women, like men, were rational beings deserving of equal rights, particularly in education and social standing. She challenged the prevailing view that women were naturally suited for domestic work and subservience. And although she lived only 10 days after the birth of Mary, her beliefs and her teachings had a great effect on her, including her beliefs in free love, although they were not yet called that. This being the belief that the institution of marriage was an oppressive one. Anyone should be allowed to love who they wish, have children with whom they wish, cohabitate with anyone who they wish, and the church and government shouldn't have any say in it. This was big time radical stuff. The death of Mary's mother would cast a shadow over her relationship with her father, who raised her alone. When she was very young, her father suffered from a terrifying condition of narcolepsy, where he would occasionally appear to to drop dead at the table, sleeping so deeply that it appeared that he was dead. For young Mary, who had already lost a parent whom she felt partially responsible for killing, to have another simply, seemingly die in front of her repeatedly throughout her life, she noted that this constant experience drew a thin line between the appearance of life and death. Death, in a way, she did not see them as Absolute but gray areas. William remarried a woman named Mary Jane Claremont, a very well educated woman with two children of her own. Young Mary and her new stepmother did not get along. In fact, many of her father's friends didn't like her either. According to his biographer, the family was terminally in debt. Her father tried to begin a children's book business that also sold games, maps and and stationary, but it never turned a profit. Mary's father was saved from debtors prison by a philosophical admirer of his anarchist political works, a man named Francis Place. He lent them money to keep them afloat. Her father also wrote children's books apart from anarchist political philosophy books. I wonder if they overlapped. I would personally love to read Anarchy for toddlers to. Despite the poverty that the family often found themselves in, Mary was well educated by her father, who tutored her and took her on educational outings. He was also friends with a number of intellectuals of the day, including poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Mary wrote that she was hiding behind the couch while Coleridge read his fabulous and famous poem from the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. I read that one on Dark Poetry, my other podcast. It's about a mariner who finds himself the only living man on a boat where all of the other sailors died and became reanimated before their spirits left their bodies. It's a spooky, ooky, wonderful poem and one that can easily be seen as an early inspiration for Mary, especially along the lines of reanimation and how the dead are not just dead. Although again, the family were poor, Mary still had another tutor and a governess. She had a deep hunger for education. Her father described her as singularly bold, somewhat imperious and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is great and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almost invincible. End quote. Mary loved to read. And if you would follow me through this cemetery gate, I believe we'll find Mary enjoying a book with her mother by lantern light. It's June 26, 1814, and the moon is big and bright tonight. Mary spent a lot of time in the churchyard where her mother was buried day and night from a very young age, she would say she were quote, going to the tomb to read in her journal. Let's just nestle behind this crypt. She shouldn't be able to hear us from over here. Jimmy. Hello, love. You nearly scared the freckles off of me. What are you doing here?
- [24:54]
Dax Shepard
I've been waiting for you.
- [24:55]
Genevieve Manion
What?
- [24:56]
Dax Shepard
You're over 50 episodes into a Victorian podcast. I knew you'd get to marry sooner or later. I also love coming here as well. Got family in and about. Love to chat too.
- [25:05]
Genevieve Manion
Oh that's lovely. Well we're not going to interrupt what's about to happen, but I suppose I should warn you the cemetery is about to get a bit steamy.
- [25:17]
Dax Shepard
Oh la la. Is Percy on his way then?
- [25:19]
Genevieve Manion
Indeed, and it appears he's right on time. Percy Shelley has just arrived to what I can only describe as my most vivid teenage goth date fantasy. Mary and Percy are on a date in a lantern lit cemetery. And it is here. Oh that he has taken her hand. And although it is dark you can see a single tear lit by the moon is rolling down her cheek. Upon her mother's grave, 16 year old Mary Godwin and 21 year old Percy Shelley have professed their love for one another. Percy is holding her hand to his heart and he is reading a poem to her. Here, I brought tissues, Jimmy.
- [26:08]
Dax Shepard
Thank you.
- [26:09]
Genevieve Manion
The poem that he is reading is called To Mary who died in this opinion. And it reads, Maiden quench the glare of sorrow struggling in thine haggard eye firmness dare to borrow from the wreck of destiny for the ray morn's bloom revealing can never boast so bright a hue as that which mocks concealing and sheds its loveliest light on you. You know this one, Jimmy?
- [26:39]
Dax Shepard
By our.
- [26:40]
Genevieve Manion
Oh.
- [26:41]
Dax Shepard
My wife lost her whole family to tuberculosis while back before we were married. And although I am not of a particular persuasion, she had always been such a dear protective friend to me and I wanted to be sure she was looked after. The day after the last funeral of a mother I offered her my aunt. And from our separate beds on our wedding night I read this poem to her.
- [27:14]
Genevieve Manion
Oh Jimmy, she's a very lucky lady.
- [27:17]
Dax Shepard
My best friend she is. She calls herself my lavender lady.
- [27:24]
Genevieve Manion
Oh. Oh yes. Well Mary and Percy are getting rather close upon her mother's grave. I think it's time we make our way back to the gate and give these crazy kids some prizes. Privacy. Always wonderful to run into you Jimmy.
- [27:40]
Dax Shepard
And you both loves.
- [27:42]
Genevieve Manion
See you in the next cemetery. Incidentally, lavender marriages are making a comeback. Personally I am taking applications myself back to Mary and Percy. Percy was a young man with a very wealthy family. He was an admirer of Mary's father and his political writings. And such an admirer that he too gave him money to prevent him from being sent to debtors prison. Although Percy was quickly alienated from his very wealthy aristocratic family in his 20s because of his political views, they wanted him to follow the Traditional models of landed aristocracy. But he wanted to donate large amounts of the family's money to the poor. What a jerk. So they essentially cut him off. Within a month of that ever so goth consummation, Mary and Percy decided to run away together to France with Mary's stepsister Claire. Percy was already married at this time. Unhappily, and despite her father's openness to free love, in theory, he did not approve of Mary's and Percy's relationship, much to her sadness and confusion. Now, although the trip that followed their graveyard romance sound sounds like it would be so much fun. They went to Paris and from there to Switzerland. They were traveling by donkey, mule, bumpy carriage, and on foot through Europe that had been recently ravaged by the Napoleonic wars. Mary wrote about France in 1814. Quote, the distress of the inhabitants whose houses had been burned, their cattle killed, and all their wealth destroyed has given a sting to my details attestation of war, end quote. So it wasn't just wine, roses and cigarettes through Paris to Switzerland for these three. But they read revolutionary books to each other and surely made out a lot between donkey tricks. While on this trip, Mary discovered that she was pregnant. They were quickly running out of money, so they returned to London. Since Mary's father shunned her and Percy's family also wanted wanted nothing to do with them. They moved into humble lodgings in Somerstown and later Nelson Square, where they entertained friends like Thomas Jefferson Hogg and Thomas Love Peacock. While Mary was pregnant, Percy was off and out, having a lovely time with her stepsister. Although both Mary and Percy were free lovers, this still made Mary distraught. Percy openly wanted Mary and Thomas Hogg to become lovers, but Mary saw him as just a dear friend and loved only Percy. Mary gave birth to a daughter, Clara, who was delivered prematurely on February 22, 1815. Mary's journal is very simple at this time, with passages such as nurse the baby read. On the morning of March 6, she awakes to feed Clara but finds that she had died in her crib. Her journal says simply, find my baby dead. Mary is devastated. She suffers reoccurring nightmares after this event, journaling, quote, dream that my little baby came to life again, that it had only been cold and that we rubbed it before the fire and it lived, end quote. And she continues, quote, awake and find no baby. The loss of little Clara haunts Mary for the rest of her life. She writes in her journal, quote, whenever I am left alone to my own thoughts, they always come back to the same point, that I was a mother and am so no longer honey. Mary fell into a depression, although not too long after, Mary found the she was pregnant again. And as luck would have it, a relative fond of Percy passed away and left him some money. Sorry, that's a terrible thing to say. But the pair were finally able to recover some from the heartache. Mary gave birth to a son, William, who they called Wilmouse, and took him to meet Lord Byron and a few friends along with Claire, to a villa in Geneva. This was to be a lovely summer getaway for friends, which turned out to be one of the blackest summers in centuries. In April of 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted, causing a significant climate event that caused a drop in global temperatures. It was called the Year Without a Summer in Geneva. According to Mary, it caused, quote, incessant rain and often confined us for days to the house. The group often amused themselves by telling ghost stories around the fire in the creepily dark and cold summer. This prompted Lord Byron to propose each guest write a spooky story of their own, and they'd vote on whose was best. Mary wasn't so sure about this. She had never written a particularly scary story before herself, which is insane that her first novel defined an entire horror genre. I can't. So she struggled a bit, even got anxious that she wouldn't be able to come up with anything at all. But then, a few nights later, Mary claims that she became possessed with what she called a waking dream. The grim terrors, as she described them, took her in a trance like state. She wrote, I saw the pale student of unhallowed art hearts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy half vital motion. Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to move mock the stupendous mechanism of the creator of the world. End quote. Oh, it feels so incredible to read that. Mind you, Mary and her friends were drinking a whole lot of wine and indulging in a pretty steady stream of laudanum, which may have in part inspired the intensity of this waking dream. Later, in 1819 31, she would describe Frankenstein as, quote, a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream, end quote. A dream that has more than a few similarities between the reoccurring nightmares that she suffered about the reanimation of her little baby Clara, who died.
- [34:38]
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- [35:07]
Genevieve Manion
For details Mary told Percy about her waking dream and her desire to write the story that would become Frankenstein, and he enthusiastically encouraged her to begin writing. She believed that it would be a short story at first, but she was overcome with inspiration. Incidentally, Lord Byron didn't come up with anything really. Neither did Percy. Claire just made out with Lord Byron. But another member of the group, John Polidori, accepted the challenge to write a spooky story which became his short fiction the Vampire, which was the first fully realized English vampire story which produced predates Bram Stoker's Dracula by 78 years. It's astounding to think that this one climate event and this one summer getaway inspired two of the most influential pieces of horror in history. It's just astounding. It's impossible not to draw the connections between Mary's desperate psychological clinging to this child and the desperation she felt to put her back together again to her story of Frankenste. In it, her monster, in her book cries out. Life, although it may be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me and I will defend it. The creature, abandoned by its maker, its father, just as she was, yearns for life itself and grips it tightly. Mary would come to dedicate the book to her father, and its unclear if this was a compliment, a satirical critique or plea for his affection. In 1816, while writing Frankenstein, Mary received a letter from her half sister Fanny describing her very unhappy life. Not long after, she was found to have died by suicide by a bottle of laudanum in a hotel room. And only two months later, Percy's estranged wife Harriet, it will also be found dead. She too died by suicide, drowning herself in the Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park, London. Percy had two children with her. Mary and Percy decided to marry to enable themselves to take custody of the children. This also smoothed the rift between them and their families, but later Percy would be ruled morally unfit to assume assume custody of his children despite the marriage, and they were placed in a convent. Six months after the completion of the book, Mary gives birth to another baby, Clara Evrina, named after her first lost child. And just after her first birthday, she dies of dysentery. While Mary and Percy are grieving the loss of their little girl, the little three year old William. William dies of malaria. Percy writes a poem about the little boy which reads, If a thing divine like thee can die, thy funeral shrine is thy mother's grief and mine. Where art thou, my gentle child? Let me think. Thy spirit feeds with its life, intense and mild, the love of living leaves and weeds, Weeds among these tombs and ruins wild. Mary, shrouded in grief, completes Frankenstein and publishes it anonymously in 1818. Mary knew that as a woman, her work, especially one as horrific and controversial as this, would not be accepted, perhaps not even published at all, due to her gender. The book didn't make a splash at first, but it gained steady popularity until it was flying off of shelves by 1821. It was then that she decided to put her name to it. Her father, who shunned her, changed his tune and even supervised the second edition. She would make some money off of the novel, but copyright laws of the time prevented her from making any money off of the many adaptations of the story. Regardless, she was fairly well paid for her book. Things were looking up. Two years later, she gave birth to a son, Percy Florence, who, thank God, survives. He will be her only child to survive. She will have one more miscarriage in 1822, losing so much blood that she almost died. Percy, afraid that Mary would die, sat her in a bathroom of ice to try to stop the bleeding. A doctor who was summoned told them that doing this saved her life. Shortly after, Mary nearly died in childbirth. On July of 1822, Percy, with his friends Edward Williams and Leigh Hunt, decided to take a short trip on a sailboat designed by a friend of Lord Byron. They never made it to their destination. A letter arrived to Mary and Percy's home from the wife of one of the men who traveled with them. It said, pray write to us and tell us you got home. For they say you had bad weather after you sailed Monday and we are anxious. Mary, reading the letter, later told a friend, the paper fell from me. I trembled all over. She and Edward, William. William's wife Jane, rushed to Livorno and Ben Pisa looking for any information about what may have happened to their husbands. Ten days after the storm, their bodies washed up on the coast near Virago. Percy and Edward were cremated in a fire on the beach. Mary was delivered his ashes. She wrote in her journal about opening the box. Quote, life of my life and soul of my soul. If his divine spirit did not penetrate mine, I could not survive to weep. Thus within the ashes, Mary finds his heart nearly fully unburnt, only dried. She takes it, wraps it in a silk shroud and one of his poems, Adonis, and keeps it in her desk drawer for the rest of her life. The poem poem was about the death of Percy's friend John Keats. A quick excerpt of this poem reads, o weep for Adonis, he is dead. Wake, melancholy mother, Wake and weep yet wherefore quench within their burning bed thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep like his a mute and unconscious complaining sleep. For he is gone where all things wise and fair descend. O, dream not that the amorous deep will yet restore him to the vital air. Death feeds on his mute voice and laughs at our despair. Mary's gray sense of death deepens. In this time, she does not speak of Percy or her children as dead. She senses them as still with her. She defines death as, quote, a wild and beautiful spirit that lives on with a beauty of its own. End quote she claims that the spirit of Edward, Percy's friend, whom he traveled with, comes to her in spite of spends hours with her. She kept memento mori of her husband and children, the heart of her husband, the hair of her children, locks tied with bows. She kept them beside Percy's heart in her desk. After Percy's death, Mary continued to write, and although it took until the 1970s to truly be appreciated, she wrote beautiful poetry and several other novels. She also wrote a travel book and short stories. She may have also had an intimate relationship with the wife of Edward Jane Williams. This, according to her biographer, Muriel Spark. In fact, Mary was dear friends with a lesbian couple who she obtained false passports for so they could live as, quote, man and wife. In France. She would be wooed by Washington Irving, author of Sleepy Hollow, and actor John Howard Howard Payne. She refused to marry either, stating that she had already been married to a genius and could only marry another. Savage Burn. Mary devoted her life to protecting her only child, Percy, making sure that he was educated and cared for. In 1844, Percy became sole heir to his father's family's fortune. Her son married four years later and and she lived with him and his wife, who she was very fond of. Although Mary dealt with a number of health issues in this time, she was finally taken care of. In 1851, Mary died at the age of 53 from a suspected brain tumor. She wanted to be buried beside her father, but the churchyard was overflowing, so she was buried instead at St. Peter's Church near her son's home in Sussex. The amount of tragedy and grief that Mary Shelley endured and the way she used her writing to exercise the very most frightening, oppressive demons imaginable in a time where women like her were expected to keep those demons locked up inside themselves themselves is nothing short of exquisite. I've mentioned that all my life when things have gotten dark, my most skillful tool for enduring is decorating the darkness. Grief, although she is a loud house guest, has some very important things to say, some there beautiful things to say about life and her tenacious nevermore is less a reminder that we will lose everyone and everything than a reminder to hold what we love close enough that we don't take them for granted, while loose enough that we don't shatter when we inevitably lose them. Easier said than done. Frankenstein is very much about this struggle, those who try to hold too tightly, and the inevitable disaster in doing so. I see Mary Shelley as a gentle warrior, someone who kept their heart soft, though so much in her life, could have turned it to stone. This is, in my opinion, the very mightiest thing a human being can do. Although most of Mary Shelley's poems are quite sad, I found one written about Percy, written after his death, and I find it to be a perfect example of the gentleman gentle touch with which she handled her grief. It is called oh, come to me in dreams, my love, and it reads oh, come to me in dreams, my love. I will not ask a dearer bliss. Come with the starry beams, my love, and press mine eyelids with with thy kiss. Twas thus, as ancient fables tell, love visited a Grecian maid, till she disturbed the sacred spell and woke to find her hopes betrayed. But gentle sleep shall veil my sight, and Psyche's lamp shall darkling be when in the vision of the night thou dost renew thy vows to me. Then come to me in dreams, my love. I will not ask a dearer bliss. Come with the starry beams, my love, and press mine eyelids with thy kiss Foreign if you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please rate the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Please leave me comments and join the fan coven@myvictoriannightmare.com Be Be Kind to yourselves and I will see you in your nightmares.