Collecting Mary Shelley

Collecting Mary Shelley

Aug 31, 2014 | Collectors' Guides, Uncategorized

Some might think collecting Mary Shelley books a daunting task. The first edition of her most important and well-known book, Frankenstein(1818), is rare and so valuable as to be out of the reach of many collectors. However, there are many other opportunities to collect her published works.

Frankenstein was almost immediately popular with the public. In 1823 the novel was turned into a stage melodrama by Richard Brinsley Peake. Presumption, or, The Fate of Frankenstein was performed at the English Opera House, a production attended by Mary and her father William Godwin. Playbills from this and other popular early productions are attractive ephemera for collectors of Mary Shelley’s books.

Partly as a result of the success of the play, Godwin arranged a second edition of Frankenstein (1823), the first to name Mary Shelley as author. As Mary was living in Italy, Godwin made the textual amendments himself, though Mary accepted those and used it as the basis for her extensively revised third edition of 1831.

First edition Frankenstein

The third edition has the important new preface, in which Mary gives a full account of the tale’s genesis in the famous storytelling competition with Byron and Polidori at the Villa Diodati, and a vivid frontispiece. It was published as one of Richard Bentley’s Standard Novels, two years ahead of his Jane Austen editions in the same series.

Frankenstein was reprinted several times throughout the 19th century, but a major boost to its persistence in popular culture was the 1931 film version directed by James Whale, and starring Boris Karloff as the creature. Karloff’s memorable portrayal is captured in book form in the photoplay edition issued in 1931. An American illustrated edition in more sophisticated vein features the powerfully dramatic wood engravings of Lynd Ward (1934).

Frankenstein was not Mary Shelley’s only pioneering work in the science fiction genre. Her novel The Last Man (1826) is set in the 21st century, when a cataclysmic plague seemingly destroys every person on earth except the narrator of the novel.

The last man

Valperga, or, The Life and Death of Castruccio Castracani (1823) and The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830) are both historical novels, set in 14th-century Italy and 15th-century English respectively.

Valperga

Lodore (1835), her fifth novel, and Falkner (1837), her sixth and final novel, shift away from supernatural or historical settings to contemporary stories offering critiques of the limitations of the conventional Victorian class and legal systems. These are both worthy titles for anyone interested in collecting Mary Shelley books that may not be apparent to the layperson.

Lodore is probably the novel in which Mary Shelley gives her least disguised portrait of Byron, though Raymond in The Last Man was also clearly modelled on him. Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister and Byron’s discarded lover, believed that Byron’s “vile spirit” haunted all her novels.

Mary Shelley’s literary career is of course inextricably linked with that of her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her first book is primarily her revision of their elopement journal, along with some added material including P. B. Shelley’s poem “Mont Blanc”, published anonymously as History of a Six Weeks’ Tour of France, Switzerland, and Germany (1817).

After his death, her carefully edited collection, The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 vols, 1839), includes her annotations that place his works within their historical context. Her edition is regarded as a turning point in the acceptance of P. B. Shelley as a major author.

Mary also published several dozen reviews, short-stories, and poems in prominent London journals and the then popular annuals, such as The Keepsake. 

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The Scientific Renaissance

The Scientific Renaissance

Aug 31, 2014 | Science & Technology

Two coincident events have been credited with sparking the scientific Renaissance. The Fall of Constantinople in 1453 accelerated the rediscovery of ancient scientific texts, while the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press made it possible to produce accurate copies of those texts, without the errors that hand-copying tended to introduce.

Within a hundred years, works that had previously circulated only in manuscript became much more readily available to the literate public, allowing the fruitful rediscovery of the scientific knowledge of the ancient and medieval writers.

For the science collector, the most notable books in this category include the first edition of Euclid’s Elementa Geometriae (Venice, 1482), the oldest mathematical textbook in the world still in common use. Ratdolt’s printing, with its marginal geometric diagrams, remains one of the most impressive technical achievements of early printing. The master of every branch of ancient knowledge was Aristotle. His Opera Omnia, in Greek, was published in Venice by Aldus, 1495–8. From their reporting of the Socratic Method, the works of Plato stand at the origin of the Western tradition of scientific enquiry. They were first printed in Latin at Florence, 1484 or 1485, and in the original Greek at Venice by Aldus, 1513. The first publication of the works of Archimedes, the greatest mathematician and engineer of antiquity, took place relatively late (Basle, 1544).

Epitoma in Almagestum Ptolemaei

Medicine was served by the first appearances in print of the works of the Greek physicians Hippocrates (Rome, 1525) and Galen (Venice, 1490) and the medieval Arab doctors Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes). Avicenna’s Canon Medicinae, translated into Latin, was printed at Strasbourg before 1473, and the best early collection of Averroes’ works, again in Latin, was published in Venice by the Giuntas in 1552. Another of the most important medical writers in the medieval Islamic world was the Persian physician al-Razi (Rhazes). His Liber Almansoris, a popular textbook, was first published in Milan, 1481. Yet another was Abu al-Qasim (Abulcasis); the pharmaceutical portion of his al-Tasrif was printed in 1471, the surgical portion in 1497, and his general theory of medicine in 1519.

Natural history is founded on the Historia Naturalis of Pliny the Elder (Venice, 1469), though his method of compilation strikes us not as pure science but as bearing comparison with the great medieval encyclopaedias, like the Etymologiae of the medieval Spanish bishop Isidore of Seville (Augsburg, 1472). Pliny’s most notable medieval follower was the German Dominican Albertus Magnus. His De Mineralibus (Padua, 1476) and De Animalibus (Rome, 1478) are key early printed works.

The general conception of the universe at this time was almost entirely founded on the works of the second-century Alexandrian astronomer and cosmographer Ptolemy. His Cosmographia described the earth as a perfect sphere with other planets in orderly orbits and systems around it. The first edition was published in Vicenza in 1475 without maps. When republished in Bologna in 1477 with maps, it formed the first attempt at a printed atlas.

Avicenna’s Canon Medicinae

Ptolemy’s other great work was the Almagest, a digest of astronomical knowledge. The translation of it into Latin begun by Puerbach and completed by Regiomontanus (Venice, 1496) points the way forward to the second phase of the scientific revolution: the shift from recovery of ancient knowledge to innovation.