1,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: e-artnow Collections
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Masterworks of Hubris and Horror – 3 Classic Gothic Novels immerses readers in a world where human ambition meets the macabre, unraveling tales that quintessentially define the Gothic tradition. This collection captures a spectrum of styles, from the ethereal prose of Romanticism to the dark, introspective reflections of human nature and error. The tales enclosed explore the chaotic terrain where scientific endeavor intersects with moral ambiguity, weaving stories rich in metaphor and moral quandary. Each piece stands alone in its exploration of terror and transcendence, yet together they form a cohesive mosaic of the Gothic imagination. This anthology features works from three luminary figures: Mary Shelley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Robert Louis Stevenson, each a master craftsman in their own right. The selected works collectively showcase the interplay between human folly, unnerving ambition, and the somber entreaties of the soul within the larger scope of the Gothic and Romantic literary movements. These authors, through their diverse backgrounds and eras, bring forth narratives that resonate with the timeless confrontation of human limits and fears, a reflections of their own historical and cultural contexts. The synergy of their voices provides a multifaceted appreciation of the morality and mystery at the heart of the Gothic genre. Masterworks of Hubris and Horror offers readers a profound exploration and discovery of themes that spiral through the corridors of the human condition. It stands as an essential resource for those drawn to the dramatic interplay between human desires and the supernatural. By engaging with this collection, readers gain access to a rich tapestry of narrative styles and thematic depth, encouraging an enriched dialogue for both academic and personal exploration, inviting each reader to ponder the eternal dance between darkness and the human spirit.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
Ähnliche
Masterworks of Hubris and Horror – 3 Classic Gothic Novels
Table of Contents
Introduction
Curatorial Vision
This collection brings together Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Rappaccini’s Daughter, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to chart how Gothic narrative interrogates audacious human striving. Each work stages an encounter between ambition and limits, where inventive minds pursue transformative power and discover unforeseen costs. By assembling these novels and tales, the collection foregrounds a lineage of experiments—scientific, moral, and emotional—that disturb natural and social bonds. The result is a focused constellation of hubris and horror, inviting readers to consider creation and control as entwined impulses that shape, and imperil, the self and community.
At the center of this grouping stands a shared inquiry into responsibility. Whether animating lifeless matter, cultivating deadly beauty, or partitioning the soul, each narrative asks who bears the burden for unleashed forces. The curatorial aim is to trace a progression from private experiment to social consequence, revealing how secrecy, pride, and love complicate any claim to mastery. Reading across the three, one encounters recurring negotiations between reason and desire, curiosity and conscience. The collection highlights this arc not as a history of techniques, but as an ethical map: the dream of improvement darkening into dilemmas of stewardship and guilt.
These works were selected to juxtapose distinct Gothic modes that converge on questions of identity and agency. Frankenstein dramatizes creation as a perilous bid for transcendence, Rappaccini’s Daughter contemplates knowledge under the sign of temptation, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde probes duplicity within a single character. Each uses atmosphere, secrecy, and the uncanny to translate philosophical inquiry into narrative pressure. Together they disclose how the pursuit of improvement can estrange its seeker, turning beneficence into domination, and love into experiment. The result is a portrait of modern ambition haunted by its own unintended progeny.
Unlike encountering each work in isolation, this collection stages a deliberate conversation among them. Placing the three side by side emphasizes their shared motifs and productive frictions, encouraging cross-references that sharpen interpretation. The grouping underscores how images of laboratories and gardens, doubles and poisons, echo across settings and plots. It also invites attention to contrasting narrative structures and tonal registers, which refract common anxieties in divergent ways. The arrangement thereby offers a compact study of hubris and horror as a sustained inquiry, rather than a series of disconnected tales, illuminating continuities that only emerge through comparative reading.
Thematic & Aesthetic Interplay
In all three works, transgression unfolds within charged enclosures. Frankenstein’s workshop, Rappaccini’s garden, and Jekyll’s laboratory operate as thresholds where nature is coerced into new forms. Such spaces shelter secrecy while amplifying dread, turning instruments and plants into agents of fate. The settings are not merely backdrops; they function as moral architectures, concentrating desire and narrowing choices. The repeated return to closed rooms and walled gardens suggests that hubris demands insulation from ordinary life. Yet isolation breeds misrecognition, and the boundaries built to control outcomes also block compassion, producing estrangement as surely as any chemical or scalpel.
Each text also experiments with mediated testimony, aligning horror with the uncertainties of storytelling. Frankenstein unfolds through layered accounts; Rappaccini’s Daughter filters its fable-like events through an observing consciousness; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde pivots on documents that disclose unsettling truths. These devices foreground perspective and delay, binding discovery to doubt. Characters interpret signs under pressure, and the reader is asked to weigh competing narratives of intention and consequence. The interplay reveals how Gothic terror thrives on epistemic fragility, where knowledge arrives piecemeal, and explanations—however plausible—never fully close the abyss they open.
Tone modulates the shared concerns. Frankenstein cultivates tragic grandeur and pity, Rappaccini’s Daughter crafts a poisonous pastoral of ambiguous allegory, while The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde distills urban panic into swift, clinical shocks. Across these registers, recurring dilemmas persist: the obligations owed to one’s creations, the uneasy coexistence of love and control, and the temptation to call purification a form of violence averted. The stories offer no settled answers, but converge on the peril of severing outcomes from accountability. Their differing textures—lyrical lament, moral parable, forensic suspense—refract improvement’s shadow into varied, arresting hues.
Intertextual echoes hum quietly through the volume. Shelley's meditation on making and forsakenness resonates with Hawthorne’s portrayal of nurtured peril, and Stevenson’s exploration of divided selfhood can be read as a later variation on the creator–creation split. None of these links requires direct borrowing; rather, they mark a shared Gothic vocabulary of secrecy, contamination, and divided agency. Imagery of stains, cold touch, and withheld names recurs, as do gestures of withdrawal and confession. The books thus speak across time as companions in a conversation about overreaching desire, each refining the language by which the others articulate dread.
Enduring Impact & Critical Reception
These masterworks endure because they entwine horror with ethical inquiry. Frankenstein exposes the costs of unchecked invention and the loneliness of sentient otherness; Rappaccini’s Daughter probes the seductions of protective harm; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde dramatizes the volatility of compartmentalized selves. Contemporary debates about technological risk, medical power, and identity fragmentation continue to find their parables here. The stories do not merely frighten; they cultivate moral imagination, insisting that choices about improvement, security, and purity inevitably redefine what counts as human care. In that insistence lies their abiding urgency and sting.
As fixtures of the Gothic tradition, these works have long attracted sustained attention from readers and scholars. Critical discussions frequently engage their portrayals of responsibility, authority, and transgression, while noting how their narrative structures complicate easy judgment. Frankenstein is often invoked when considering technological creation and obligation; Rappaccini’s Daughter is cited for its moral allegory of cultivated peril; and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde anchors debates about duplicity and the performative self. Such recognition reflects not fashion but fitness: they offer supple frameworks through which successive eras test their evolving fears.
Beyond classrooms and libraries, the figures animating these narratives have entered a shared lexicon. The very names of creator and creature, the poisonous garden, and the fused pair of Jekyll and Hyde serve as shorthand for wrenching ethical ambiguities. Their circulation in theater, film, and other arts has amplified this visibility while continually reframing the questions at stake. Such afterlives demonstrate how Gothic imagination migrates into civic discourse, where metaphors of monstrosity, contamination, and doubling shape arguments about responsibility. The stories thus persist as cultural instruments, tuning public debates with images that both clarify and unsettle.
Read together, these works chart a compact atlas of modern fear: invention without humility, intimacy repurposed as experiment, and virtue split into warring halves. Their pages offer neither prescriptions nor reassurances; instead they enact crises of conscience, asking how far one may go in remaking life and self. The collection preserves their singularities while highlighting a common core: the dream of mastery summons consequences that cannot be quarantined. This tension, articulated through unforgettable scenes and voices, continues to energize reflection across disciplines. The result is a durable conversation about ambition made visible by the shadows it casts.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
These works emerge from a long nineteenth century convulsed by revolution, empire, and industrial transformation. In Britain and the United States alike, expanding markets and mechanization reconfigured labor, class, and the rhythms of everyday life. Public debates over poor relief, prison reform, scientific education, and the moral responsibilities of the professional classes became fixtures of the press. Religious authority contended with secular expertise, while new institutions—laboratories, hospitals, museums—consolidated forms of knowledge and power. The Gothic mode proved unusually suited to staging these tensions, translating anxieties about governance, surveillance, and social mobility into intimate dramas of secrecy, conscience, and bodily risk. Each novel focuses that broad upheaval through private experiments with public consequences.
Frankenstein, published in 1818, reflects a Britain just emerging from prolonged war and spiraling into industrial expansion. The narrative’s fascination with universities, scientific societies, and distant expeditions mirrors a culture eager to test, classify, and conquer. Yet postwar austerity and urban poverty sharpened suspicion toward elite experimenters who claimed benevolence while profiting from disruption. The novel’s attention to apprenticeship, credit, and reputation tracks an economy in which merit and inheritance jostled uneasily. It questions whether ambitious private inquiry can answer to communal welfare, and whether the tools of improvement—anatomy, chemistry, and the entrepreneurial spirit—serve human dignity or merely magnify existing hierarchies and exclusions.
The 1818 edition also intervenes in gendered power. A young woman’s authorship confronted a literary marketplace and scientific culture that coded authority as masculine. The book’s domestic spaces—parlors, nurseries, letters among kin—are not mere backdrops but contested jurisdictions where care, consent, and accountability should be negotiated. Its epistolary frame models a transnational public sphere in miniature, probing who is permitted to narrate knowledge and assign blame. Legal order, familial duty, and social reputation form overlapping courts of judgment. By situating scientific aspiration amid these institutions, the novel exposes how ambition can bypass or hollow out the slower, relational ethics that societies rely on to civilize power.
Rappaccini’s Daughter appears in the volatile United States of the 1840s, a republic torn between reformist zeal and entrenching injustice. Expansion, commercial speculation, and intensifying conflict over enslavement created a climate in which purity and contamination—moral, racial, environmental—became charged metaphors. The tale’s Italian setting and university garden displace American arguments onto a Renaissance stage, letting readers scrutinize paternal authority, medical prerogative, and the commerce of knowledge at a safe remove. Within this fable-like architecture, the dynamics of guardianship, consent, and experiment echo congressional hearings and courtroom debates. The story probes how intimate bonds can be conscripted to advance reputations, turning love, care, and tutelage into instruments of control.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde emerges from late-Victorian urban modernity, where professional guilds regulated access to prestige and the law codified moral norms into administrative routines. Industrial wealth and imperial trade financed grand avenues while sustaining shadow economies of labor and pleasure. Medical jurisprudence, public sanitation, and municipal policing promised rational order, yet fog-shrouded streets symbolized the anonymity that thwarted surveillance. Respectability became a form of currency convertible into impunity, particularly for well-placed gentlemen. The novella concentrates these pressures into a laboratory and a set of clubrooms, mapping how bureaucratic power and private indulgence coexist—and how the city itself abets the separation of persona from accountability.
Across the anthology, institutions mediate ambition: the household, the university, the learned society, the club, the courtroom. These settings stage conflicts over consent and disclosure as much as over discovery. Letters, depositions, and professional etiquette offer procedural ethics, yet they are reversible, masking complicity as prudence. The works explore the limits of legal and social remedy when harm is distributed, causation is murky, and reputations are at stake. They ask whether modern power operates most decisively not through overt tyranny but through gatekeeping, credentialing, and the quiet privatization of risk—especially when curiosity can be exercised behind doors society is trained to trust.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
The collection sits at the crossroads of Enlightenment confidence and Romantic suspicion. Experimental reason promised mastery over nature; Romantic aesthetics insisted that sublimity, passion, and moral imagination exceed calculation. Gothic narrative became a laboratory for testing both claims. Frankenstein channels the awe of vast landscapes and the terror of boundary-crossing inquiry. Rappaccini’s Daughter condenses high ideas into fable, where ethical paradox appears as sensuous beauty. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde distills philosophical debate into a brisk urban parable. Throughout, the sublime is not merely scenic; it is a pressure exerted on reason, exposing how method falters before feeling and mystery.
Scientific and technological innovations saturate these texts. Early-nineteenth-century chemistry and physiology inform the speculative energies of Frankenstein, while the era’s fascination with electricity and life-processes gives the novel its intellectual spark. Rappaccini’s Daughter reflects advances in botany and toxicology, treating the garden as an experimental theater where cultivation shades into manipulation. Late-Victorian pharmacy, laboratory technique, and emerging psychological discourse shape The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which treats the self as analyzable yet dangerously malleable. Each work probes whether method guarantees morality, or whether technique without an accompanying ethic only amplifies our capacity to harm under the banner of improvement.
Religious legacies also structure aesthetic choices. In Frankenstein, conscience wrestles with providence as characters test whether fate or free agency governs suffering. Rappaccini’s Daughter invokes a morality of temptation and innocence, reframing doctrinal questions as dilemmas of knowledge and care. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde translates sin into case history, where guilt looks like pathology yet retains an irreducible moral sting. Across the anthology, confession—letters, testimonies, sealed documents—adapts an old spiritual technology to modern readerships. Narrative becomes a surrogate sacrament, staging judgment not in a church but in a reader’s deliberation over competing claims.
Formal experimentation supports these ethical inquiries. Frankenstein’s layered frames—arctic correspondence enclosing a life-story enclosing other voices—model a chain of custody for truth, inviting scrutiny of how testimony is curated. Rappaccini’s Daughter adopts the compact architecture of a moral romance, extracting universal dilemmas from a concentrated tableau. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde borrows the briskness of the sensation tale and the clinical cool of the case report, withholding key documents until late to ask when disclosure is healing and when it is ruinous. Form here is method: each compositional choice performs a theory of how knowledge should circulate.
The anthology mobilizes strong symbolic ecologies. Frankenstein opposes expansive, austere landscapes to cramped workshops, staging a drama between openness and secrecy; it associates sight, sound, and touch with debt, promise, and social recognition. Rappaccini’s Daughter turns blossoms, odors, and thresholds into a grammar of attraction and hazard, where beauty carries the charge of experiment. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde choreographs fog, doors, and street-corners to visualize compartmentalized identity and urban permeability. Language toggles between clinical precision and lyrical excess, reproducing the very oscillation between rational mastery and destabilizing wonder that defines nineteenth-century aesthetics.
These texts also map a transatlantic field of rival sensibilities. English Romanticism’s inquiry into creativity and responsibility informs Frankenstein. The American moral romance, attentive to allegory and inherited conscience, shapes Rappaccini’s Daughter. A distinctly Scottish psychological Gothic—concise, urbane, and ethically surgical—animates The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Publication venues and readerships mattered: magazines and lending libraries cultivated tastes for brevity, shock, and moral takeaway, while multi-volume fiction fostered patient immersion. The authors respond to these markets by refining pace and density, demonstrating how the Gothic could be both a philosophical instrument and a popular entertainment calibrated for rapid circulation.
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
Initial reception reveals competing moral economies. Frankenstein’s 1818 iteration startled readers with speculative audacity; adaptations quickly simplified its conflicts into stage melodrama, substituting spectacle for scruple and misdirecting public memory. Rappaccini’s Daughter, circulating in magazines, invited debate over the ethics of scientific paternalism and the perils of didactic allegory. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde became an immediate sensation, its compact plot feeding urban curiosity and cautionary rhetoric about vice. Yet in each case, respectability discourse often framed interpretation, treating the works as warnings without tracking their systemic critique of credentialed authority and the social mechanisms that shelter it.
Early-twentieth-century readers increasingly filtered these works through psychology and criminology. Concepts of the unconscious and habit formation reframed inner conflict as layered or split, making The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde a touchstone for duality. Global wars then recoded Frankenstein as a meditation on technological violence and dispersed responsibility—how chains of command can produce catastrophe even when individual motives appear benign. Rappaccini’s Daughter acquired new resonance as modern laboratory protocol took shape, clarifying distinctions between curiosity, consent, and coercion. Across the anthology, critics began to read not only moral fables but also institutional diagnostics about risk and accountability.
Cold War anxieties intensified these shifts. Nuclear energy and chemical agriculture turned the themes of unintended consequence into public policy concerns. Frankenstein became shorthand for runaway innovation and the politics of oversight, called up whenever invention threatened to outstrip deliberation. Rappaccini’s Daughter was enlisted in debates over environmental contamination and the ethics of enhancement, its garden now legible as ecosystem and laboratory alike. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde spoke to surveillance culture and bureaucratic duplicity, offering a parable of respectable façades masking authorized harm. In classrooms and think tanks, the trio became case studies for the governance of science.
From the late twentieth century onward, interpretive communities multiplied. Feminist scholarship returned to the 1818 Frankenstein to foreground authorship, reproductive metaphors, and the politics of caretaking. Disability studies challenged stigmas attached to otherness across the anthology, asking how societies manufacture monstrosity. Postcolonial and race-conscious readings traced hierarchies embedded in exploration, classification, and policing. Queer criticism reinterpreted secrecy, companionship, and divided life in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, while environmental humanities recast Rappaccini’s garden as a contested multispecies enclave. Contemporary bioethics debates—genetics, organ transplantation, enhancement—keep these narratives vivid as living arguments.
Today, the texts circulate through films, theater, graphic narratives, and digital media, each adaptation highlighting a different ethical hinge. Scholars continue to debate editorial questions—especially the stakes of reading Frankenstein in its original 1818 form versus later revisions—and to reassess the moral calculus in Rappaccini’s Daughter and the evidentiary frames in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Pedagogically, the trio anchors courses linking literature to science and law, inviting students to practice slow, collective judgment. Far from settled warnings, these works function as open dossiers on power: how curiosity is licensed, how harm is distributed, and how society might learn to answer for its experiments.
Masterworks of Hubris and Horror – 3 Classic Gothic Novels
Hubris, Science, and Transgression
Identity, Duality, and the Monstrous Other
The Original 1818 'Uncensored' Edition) (Mary Shelley
Frankenstein
PREFACE
THE event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence. I shall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination; yet, in assuming it as the basis of a work of fancy, I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors. The event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment. It was recommended by the novelty of the situations which it developes; and, however impossible as a physical fact, affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield.
I have thus endeavoured to preserve the truth of the elementary principles of human nature, while I have not scrupled to innovate upon their combinations. The Iliad, the tragic poetry of Greece, Shakespeare, in the Tempest and Midsummer Night’s Dream and most especially Milton, in Paradise Lost, conform to this rule; and the most humble novelist, who seeks to confer or receive amusement from his labours, may, without presumption, apply to prose fiction a licence, or rather a rule, from the adoption of which so many exquisite combinations of human feeling have resulted in the highest specimens of poetry.
The circumstance on which my story rests was suggested in casual conversation. It was commenced partly as a source of amusement, and partly as an expedient for exercising any untried resources of mind. Other motives were mingled with these as the work proceeded. I am by no means indifferent to the manner in which whatever moral tendencies exist in the sentiments or characters it contains shall affect the reader; yet my chief concern in this respect has been limited to the avoiding the enervating effects of the novels of the present day, and to the exhibition of the amiableness of domestic affection, and the excellence of universal virtue. The opinions which naturally spring from the character and situation of the hero are by no means to be conceived as existing always in my own conviction; nor is any inference justly to be drawn from the following pages as prejudicing any philosophical doctrine of whatever kind.
It is a subject also of additional interest to the author that this story was begun in the majestic region where the scene is principally laid, and in society which cannot cease to be regretted. I passed the summer of 1816 in the environs of Geneva. The season was cold and rainy, and in the evenings we crowded around a blazing wood fire, and occasionally amused ourselves with some German stories of ghosts, which happened to fall into our hands. These tales excited in us a playful desire of imitation. Two other friends (a tale from the pen of one of whom would be far more acceptable to the public than anything I can ever hope to produce) and myself agreed to write each a story founded on some supernatural occurrence.
The weather, however, suddenly became serene; and my two friends left me on a journey among the Alps, and lost, in the magnificent scenes which they present, all memory of their ghostly visions. The following tale is the only one which has been completed.
Marlow, September, 1817
VOLUME ONE
LETTER ONE
TO MRS. SAVILLE, ENGLAND.
St. Petersburgh, Dec. 11th, 17 – .
You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings. I arrived here yesterday; and my first task is to assure my dear sister of my welfare, and increasing confidence in the success of my undertaking.
I am already far north of London; and as I walk in the streets of Petersburgh, I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves, and fills me with delight. Do you understand this feeling? This breeze, which has travelled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy climes. Inspirited by this wind of promise, my day dreams become more fervent and vivid. I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight. There, Margaret, the sun is for ever visible; its broad disk just skirting the horizon, and diffusing a perpetual splendour. There – for with your leave, my sister, I will put some trust in preceding navigators – there snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe. Its productions and features may be without example, as the phænomena of the heavenly bodies undoubtedly are in those undiscovered solitudes. What may not be expected in a country of eternal light? I may there discover the wondrous power which attracts the needle; and may regulate a thousand celestial observations, that require only this voyage to render their seeming eccentricities consistent for ever. I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before visited, and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man. These are my enticements, and they are sufficient to conquer all fear of danger or death, and to induce me to commence this laborious voyage with the joy a child feels when he embarks in a little boat, with his holiday mates, on an expedition of discovery up his native river. But, supposing all these conjectures to be false, you cannot contest the inestimable benefit which I shall confer on all mankind to the last generation, by discovering a passage near the pole to those countries, to reach which at present so many months are requisite; or by ascertaining the secret of the magnet, which, if at all possible, can only be effected by an undertaking such as mine.
These reflections have dispelled the agitation with which I began my letter, and I feel my heart glow with an enthusiasm which elevates me to heaven; for nothing contributes so much to tranquillize the mind as a steady purpose – a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye. This expedition has been the favourite dream of my early years. I have read with ardour the accounts of the various voyages which have been made in the prospect of arriving at the North Pacific Ocean through the seas which surround the pole. You may remember, that a history of all the voyages made for purposes of discovery composed the whole of our good uncle Thomas’s library. My education was neglected, yet I was passionately fond of reading. These volumes were my study day and night, and my familiarity with them increased that regret which I had felt, as a child, on learning that my father’s dying injunction had forbidden my uncle to allow me to embark in a sea-faring life.
These visions faded when I perused, for the first time, those poets whose effusions entranced my soul, and lifted it to heaven. I also became a poet, and for one year lived in a Paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated. You are well acquainted with my failure, and how heavily I bore the disappointment. But just at that time I inherited the fortune of my cousin, and my thoughts were turned into the channel of their earlier bent.
Six years have passed since I resolved on my present undertaking. I can, even now, remember the hour from which I dedicated myself to this great enterprise. I commenced by inuring my body to hardship. I accompanied the whale-fishers on several expeditions to the North Sea; I voluntarily endured cold, famine, thirst, and want of sleep; I often worked harder than the common sailors during the day, and devoted my nights to the study of mathematics, the theory of medicine, and those branches of physical science from which a naval adventurer might derive the greatest practical advantage. Twice I actually hired myself as an undermate in a Greenland whaler, and acquitted myself to admiration. I must own I felt a little proud, when my captain offered me the second dignity in the vessel, and entreated me to remain with the greatest earnestness; so valuable did he consider my services.
And now, dear Margaret, do I not deserve to accomplish some great purpose. My life might have been passed in case and luxury; but I preferred glory to every enticement that wealth placed in my path. Oh, that some encouraging voice would answer in the affirmative! My courage and my resolution is firm; but my hopes fluctuate, and my spirits are often depressed. I am about to proceed on a long and difficult voyage; the emergencies of which will demand all my fortitude: I am required not only to raise the spirits of others, but sometimes to sustain my own, when their’s are failing.
This is the most favourable period for travelling in Russia. They fly quickly over the snow in their sledges; the motion is pleasant, and, in my opinion, far more agreeable than that of an English stage-coach. The cold is not excessive, if you are wrapt in furs, a dress which I have already adopted; for there is a great difference between walking the deck and remaining seated motionless for hours, when no exercise prevents the blood from actually freezing in your veins. I have no ambition to lose my life on the post-road between St. Petersburgh and Archangel.
I shall depart for the latter town in a fortnight or three weeks; and my intention is to hire a ship there, which can easily be done by paying the insurance for the owner, and to engage as many sailors as I think necessary among those who are accustomed to the whale-fishing. I do not intend to sail until the month of June: and when shall I return? Ah, dear sister, how can I answer this question? If I succeed, many, many months, perhaps years, will pass before you and I may meet. If I fail, you will see me again soon, or never.
Farewell, my dear, excellent, Margaret. Heaven shower down blessings on you, and save me, that I may again and again testify my gratitude for all your love and kindness.
Your affectionate brother,
R. WALTON.
LETTER TWO
TO MRS. SAVILLE, ENGLAND.
Archangel, 28th March, 17 – .
How slowly the time passes here, encompassed as I am by frost and snow; yet a second step is taken towards my enterprise. I have hired a vessel,and am occupied in collecting my sailors; those whom I have already engaged appear to be men on whom I can depend, and are certainly possessed of dauntless courage.
But I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy; and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil. I have no friend, Margaret: when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to participate my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will endeavour to sustain me in dejection. I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me; whose eyes would reply to mine. You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend. I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my plans. How would such a friend repair the faults of your poor brother! I am too ardent in execution, and too impatient of difficulties. But it is a still greater evil to me that I am self-educated: for the first fourteen years of my life I ran wild on a common, and read nothing but our uncle Thomas’s books of voyages. At that age I became acquainted with the celebrated poets of our own country; but it was only when it had ceased to be in my power to derive its most important benefits from such a conviction, that I perceived the necessity of becoming acquainted with more languages than that of my native country. Now I am twenty-eight, and am in reality more illiterate than many school-boys of fifteen. It is true that I have thought more, and that my day dreams are more extended and magnificent; but they want (as the painters call it) keeping; and I greatly need a friend who would have sense enough not to despise me as romantic, and affection enough for me to endeavour to regulate my mind.
Well, these are useless complaints; I shall certainly find no friend on the wide ocean, nor even here in Archangel, among merchants and seamen. Yet some feelings, unallied to the dross of human nature, beat even in these rugged bosoms. My lieutenant, for instance, is a man of wonderful courage and enterprise; he is madly desirous of glory. He is an Englishman, and in the midst of national and professional prejudices, unsoftened by cultivation, retains some of the noblest endowments of humanity. I first became acquainted with him on board a whale vessel: finding that he was unemployed in this city, I easily engaged him to assist in my enterprise.
The master is a person of an excellent disposition, and is remarkable in the ship for his gentleness, and the mildness of his discipline. He is, indeed, of so amiable a nature, that he will not hunt (a favourite, and almost the only amusement here), because he cannot endure to spill blood. He is, moreover, heroically generous. Some years ago he loved a young Russian lady, of moderate fortune; and having amassed a considerable sum in prize-money, the father of the girl consented to the match. He saw his mistress once before the destined ceremony; but she was bathed in tears, and, throwing herself at his feet, entreated him to spare her, confessing at the same time that she loved another, but that he was poor, and that her father would never consent to the union. My generous friend reassured the suppliant, and on being informed of the name of her lover instantly abandoned his pursuit. He had already bought a farm with his money, on which he had designed to pass the remainder of his life; but he bestowed the whole on his rival, together with the remains of his prize-money to purchase stock, and then himself solicited the young woman’s father to consent to her marriage with her lover. But the old man decidedly refused, thinking himself bound in honour to my friend; who, when he found the father inexorable, quitted his country, nor returned until he heard that his former mistress was married according to her inclinations. “What a noble fellow!” you will exclaim. He is so; but then he has passed all his life on board a vessel, and has scarcely an idea beyond the rope and the shroud.
But do not suppose that, because I complain a little, or because I can conceive a consolation for my toils which I may never know, that I am wavering in my resolutions. Those are as fixed as fate; and my voyage is only now delayed until the weather shall permit my embarkation. The winter has been dreadfully severe; but the spring promises well, and it is considered as a remarkably early season; so that, perhaps, I may sail sooner than I expected. I shall do nothing rashly; you know me sufficiently to confide in my prudence and considerateness whenever the safety of others is committed to my care.
I cannot describe to you my sensations on the near prospect of my undertaking. It is impossible to communicate to you a conception of the trembling sensation, half pleasurable and half fearful, with which I am preparing to depart. I am going to unexplored regions, to “the land of mist and snow;” but I shall kill no albatross, therefore do not be alarmed for my safety.
Shall I meet you again, after having traversed immense seas, and returned by the most southern cape of Africa or America? I dare not expect such success, yet I cannot bear to look on the reverse of the picture. Continue to write to me by every opportunity: I may receive your letters (though the chance is very doubtful) on some occasions when I need them most to support my spirits. I love you very tenderly. Remember me with affection, should you never hear from me again.
Your affectionate brother,
ROBERT WALTON.
LETTER THREE
TO MRS. SAVILLE, ENGLAND.
July 7th, 17 – .
MY DEAR SISTER, I write a few lines in haste, to say that I am safe, and well advanced on my voyage. This letter will reach England by a merchant-man now on its homeward voyage from Archangel; more fortunate than I, who may not see my native land, perhaps, for many years. I am, however, in good spirits: my men are bold, and apparently firm of purpose; nor do the floating sheets of ice that continually pass us, indicating the dangers of the region towards which we are advancing, appear to dismay them. We have already reached a very high latitude; but it is the height of summer, and although not so warm as in England, the southern gales, which blow us speedily towards those shores which I so ardently desire to attain, breathe a degree of renovating warmth which I had not expected.
No incidents have hitherto befallen us, that would make a figure in a letter. One or two stiff gales, and the breaking of a mast, are accidents which experienced navigators scarcely remember to record; and I shall be well content, if nothing worse happen to us during our voyage.
Adieu, my dear Margaret. Be assured, that for my own sake, as well as yours, I will not rashly encounter danger. I will be cool, persevering, and prudent.
Remember me to all my English friends.
Most affectionately yours, R. W.
LETTER FOURTO MRS. SAVILLE, ENGLAND.
August 5th, 17 – .
So strange an accident has happened to us, that I cannot forbear recording it, although it is very probable that you will see me before these papers can come into your possession.
Last Monday (July 31st), we were nearly surrounded by ice, which closed in the ship on all sides, scarcely leaving her the sea room in which she floated. Our situation was somewhat dangerous, especially as we were compassed round by a very thick fog. We accordingly lay to, hoping that some change would take place in the atmosphere and weather.
About two o’clock the mist cleared away, and we beheld, stretched out in every direction, vast and irregular plains of ice, which seemed to have no end. Some of my comrades groaned, and my own mind began to grow watchful with anxious thoughts, when a strange sight suddenly attracted our attention, and diverted our solicitude from our own situation. We perceived a low carriage, fixed on a sledge and drawn by dogs, pass on towards the north, at the distance of half a mile: a being which had the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature, sat in the sledge, and guided the dogs. We watched the rapid progress of the traveller with our telescopes, until he was lost among the distant inequalities of the ice.
This appearance excited our unqualified wonder. We were, as we believed, many hundred miles from any land, but this apparition seemed to denote that it was not, in reality, so distant as we had supposed. Shut in, however, by ice, it was impossible to follow his track, which we had observed with the greatest attention.
About two hours after this occurrence, we heard the ground sea, and before night the ice broke, and freed our ship. We, however, lay to until the morning, fearing to encounter in the dark those large loose masses which float about after the breaking up of the ice. I profited of this time to rest for a few hours.
In the morning, however, as soon as it was light, I went upon deck, and found all the sailors busy on one side of the vessel, apparently talking to some one in the sea. It was, in fact, a sledge, like that we had seen before, which had drifted towards us in the night, on a large fragment of ice. Only one dog remained alive; but there was a human being within it, whom the sailors were persuading to enter the vessel. He was not, as the other traveller seemed to be, a savage inhabitant of some undiscovered island, but an European. When I appeared on deck, the master said, “Here is our captain, and he will not allow you to perish on the open sea.”
On perceiving me, the stranger addressed me in English, although with a foreign accent. “Before I come on board your vessel,” said he, “will you have the kindness to inform me whither you are bound?”
You may conceive my astonishment on hearing such a question addressed to me from a man on the brink of destruction, and to whom I should have supposed that my vessel would have been a resource which he would not have exchanged for the most precious wealth the earth can afford. I replied, however, that we were on a voyage of discovery towards the northern pole.
Upon hearing this he appeared satisfied, and consented to come on board. Good God! Margaret, if you had seen the man who thus capitulated for his safety, your surprise would have been boundless. His limbs were nearly frozen, and his body dreadfully emaciated by fatigue and suffering. I never saw a man in so wretched a condition. We attempted to carry him into the cabin; but as soon as he had quitted the fresh air, he fainted. We accordingly brought him back to the deck, and restored him to animation by rubbing him with brandy, and forcing him to swallow a small quantity. As soon as he shewed signs of life, we wrapped him up in blankets, and placed him near the chimney of the kitchen-stove. By slow degrees he recovered, and ate a little soup, which restored him wonderfully.
Two days passed in this manner before he was able to speak; and I often feared that his sufferings had deprived him of understanding. When he had in some measure recovered, I removed him to my own cabin, and attended on him as much as my duty would permit. I never saw a more interesting creature: his eyes have generally an expression of wildness, and even madness; but there are moments when, if any one performs an act of kindness towards him, or does him any the most trifling service, his whole countenance is lighted up, as it were, with a beam of benevolence and sweetness that I never saw equalled. But he is generally melancholy and despairing; and sometimes he gnashes his teeth, as if impatient of the weight of woes that oppresses him.
When my guest was a little recovered, I had great trouble to keep off the men, who wished to ask him a thousand questions; but I would not allow him to be tormented by their idle curiosity, in a state of body and mind whose restoration evidently depended upon entire repose. Once, however, the lieutenant asked, Why he had come so far upon the ice in so strange a vehicle?
His countenance instantly assumed an aspect of the deepest gloom; and he replied, “To seek one who fled from me.”
“And did the man whom you pursued travel in the same fashion?”
“Yes.”
“Then I fancy we have seen him; for, the day before we picked you up, we saw some dogs drawing a sledge, with a man in it, across the ice.”
This aroused the stranger’s attention; and he asked a multitude of questions concerning the route which the dæmon, as he called him, had pursued. Soon after, when he was alone with me, he said, “I have, doubtless, excited your curiosity, as well as that of these good people; but you are too considerate to make inquiries.”
“Certainly; it would indeed be very impertinent and inhuman in me to trouble you with any inquisitiveness of mine.”
“And yet you rescued me from a strange and perilous situation; you have benevolently restored me to life.”
Soon after this he inquired, if I thought that the breaking up of the ice had destroyed the other sledge? I replied, that I could not answer with any degree of certainty; for the ice had not broken until near midnight, and the traveller might have arrived at a place of safety before that time; but of this I could not judge.
From this time the stranger seemed very eager to be upon deck, to watch for the sledge which had before appeared; but I have persuaded him to remain in the cabin, for he is far too weak to sustain the rawness of the atmosphere. But I have promised that some one should watch for him, and give him instant notice if any new object should appear in sight.
Such is my journal of what relates to this strange occurrence up to the present day. The stranger has gradually improved in health, but is very silent, and appears uneasy when any one except myself enters his cabin. Yet his manners are so conciliating and gentle, that the sailors are all interested in him, although they have had very little communication with him. For my own part, I begin to love him as a brother; and his constant and deep grief fills me with sympathy and compassion. He must have been a noble creature in his better days, being even now in wreck so attractive and amiable.
I said in one of my letters, my dear Margaret, that I should find no friend on the wide ocean; yet I have found a man who, before his spirit had been broken by misery, I should have been happy to have possessed as the brother of my heart.
I shall continue my journal concerning the stranger at intervals, should I have any fresh incidents to record.
August 13th, 17 – .
My affection for my guest increases every day. He excites at once my admiration and my pity to an astonishing degree. How can I see so noble a creature destroyed by misery without feeling the most poignant grief? He is so gentle, yet so wise; his mind is so cultivated; and when he speaks, although his words are culled with the choicest art, yet they flow with rapidity and unparalleled eloquence.
He is now much recovered from his illness, and is continually on the deck, apparently watching for the sledge that preceded his own. Yet, although unhappy, he is not so utterly occupied by his own misery, but that he interests himself deeply in the employments of others. He has asked me many questions concerning my design; and I have related my little history frankly to him. He appeared pleased with the confidence, and suggested several alterations in my plan, which I shall find exceedingly useful. There is no pedantry in his manner; but all he does appears to spring solely from the interest he instinctively takes in the welfare of those who surround him. He is often overcome by gloom, and then he sits by himself, and tries to overcome all that is sullen or unsocial in his humour. These paroxysms pass from him like a cloud from before the sun, though his dejection never leaves him. I have endeavoured to win his confidence; and I trust that I have succeeded. One day I mentioned to him the desire I had always felt of finding a friend who might sympathize with me, and direct me by his counsel. I said, I did not belong to that class of men who are offended by advice. “I am self-educated, and perhaps I hardly rely sufficiently upon my own powers. I wish therefore that my companion should be wiser and more experienced than myself, to confirm and support me; nor have I believed it impossible to find a true friend.”
“I agree with you,” replied the stranger, “in believing that friendship is not only a desirable, but a possible acquisition. I once had a friend, the most noble of human creatures, and am entitled, therefore, to judge respecting friendship. You have hope, and the world before you, and have no cause for despair. But I – I have lost every thing, and cannot begin life anew.”
As he said this, his countenance became expressive of a calm settled grief, that touched me to the heart. But he was silent, and presently retired to his cabin.
Even broken in spirit as he is, no one can feel more deeply than he does the beauties of nature. The starry sky, the sea, and every sight afforded by these wonderful regions, seems still to have the power of elevating his soul from earth. Such a man has a double existence: he may suffer misery, and be overwhelmed by disappointments, yet when he has retired into himself, he will be like a celestial spirit, that has a halo around him, within whose circle no grief or folly ventures.
Will you laugh at the enthusiasm I express concerning this divine wanderer? If you do, you must have certainly lost that simplicity which was once your characteristic charm. Yet, if you will, smile at the warmth of my expressions, while I find every day new causes for repeating them.
August 19th, 17 – .
Yesterday the stranger said to me, “You may easily perceive, Captain Walton, that I have suffered great and unparalleled misfortunes. I had determined, once, that the memory of these evils should die with me; but you have won me to alter my determination. You seek for knowledge and wisdom, as I once did; and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you, as mine has been. I do not know that the relation of my misfortunes will be useful to you, yet, if you are inclined, listen to my tale. I believe that the strange incidents connected with it will afford a view of nature, which may enlarge your faculties and understanding. You will hear of powers and occurrences, such as you have been accustomed to believe impossible: but I do not doubt that my tale conveys in its series internal evidence of the truth of the events of which it is composed.”
You may easily conceive that I was much gratified by the offered communication; yet I could not endure that he should renew his grief by a recital of his misfortunes. I felt the greatest eagerness to hear the promised narrative, partly from curiosity, and partly from a strong desire to ameliorate his fate, if it were in my power. I expressed these feelings in my answer.
“I thank you,” he replied, “for your sympathy, but it is useless; my fate is nearly fulfilled. I wait but for one event, and then I shall repose in peace. I understand your feeling,” continued he, perceiving that I wished to interrupt him; “but you are mistaken, my friend, if thus you will allow me to name you; nothing can alter my destiny: listen to my history, and you will perceive how irrevocably it is determined.”
He then told me, that he would commence his narrative the next day when I should be at leisure. This promise drew from me the warmest thanks. I have resolved every night, when I am not engaged, to record, as nearly as possible in his own words, what he has related during the day. If I should be engaged, I will at least make notes. This manuscript will doubtless afford you the greatest pleasure: but to me, who know him, and who hear it from his own lips, with what interest and sympathy shall I read it in some future day!
CHAPTER ONE
I AM by birth a Genevese; and my family is one of the most distinguished of that republic. My ancestors had been for many years counsellors and syndics; and my father had filled several public situations with honour and reputation. He was respected by all who knew him for his integrity and indefatigable attention to public business. He passed his younger days perpetually occupied by the affairs of his country; and it was not until the decline of life that he thought of marrying, and bestowing on the state sons who might carry his virtues and his name down to posterity.
As the circumstances of his marriage illustrate his character, I cannot refrain from relating them. One of his most intimate friends was a merchant, who, from a flourishing state, fell, through numerous mischances, into poverty. This man, whose name was Beaufort, was of a proud and unbending disposition, and could not bear to live in poverty and oblivion in the same country where he had formerly been distinguished for his rank and magnificence. Having paid his debts, therefore, in the most honourable manner, he retreated with his daughter to the town of Lucerne, where he lived unknown and in wretchedness. My father loved Beaufort with the truest friendship, and was deeply grieved by his retreat in these unfortunate circumstances. He grieved also for the loss of his society, and resolved to seek him out and endeavour to persuade him to begin the world again through his credit and assistance.
Beaufort had taken effectual measures to conceal himself; and it was ten months before my father discovered his abode. Overjoyed at this discovery, he hastened to the house, which was situated in a mean street, near the Reuss. But when he entered, misery and despair alone welcomed him. Beaufort had saved but a very small sum of money from the wreck of his fortunes: but it was sufficient to provide him with sustenance for some months, and in the mean time he hoped to procure some respectable employment in a merchant’s house. The interval was consequently spent in inaction; his grief only became more deep and rankling, when he had leisure for reflection; and at length it took so fast hold of his mind, that at the end of three months he lay on a bed of sickness, incapable of any exertion.
His daughter attended him with the greatest tenderness; but she saw with despair that their little fund was rapidly decreasing, and that there was no other prospect of support. But Caroline Beaufort possessed a mind of an uncommon mould; and her courage rose to support her in her adversity. She procured plain work; she plaited straw; and by various means contrived to earn a pittance scarcely sufficient to support life.
Several months passed in this manner. Her father grew worse; her time was more entirely occupied in attending him; her means of subsistence decreased; and in the tenth month her father died in her arms, leaving her an orphan and a beggar. This last blow overcame her; and she knelt by Beaufort’s coffin, weeping bitterly, when my father entered the chamber. He came like a protecting spirit to the poor girl, who committed herself to his care, and after the interment of his friend he conducted her to Geneva, and placed her under the protection of a relation. Two years after this event Caroline became his wife.
When my father became a husband and a parent, he found his time so occupied by the duties of his new situation, that he relinquished many of his public employments, and devoted himself to the education of his children. Of these I was the eldest, and the destined successor to all his labours and utility. No creature could have more tender parents than mine. My improvement and health were their constant care, especially as I remained for several years their only child. But before I continue my narrative, I must record an incident which took place when I was four years of age.
My father had a sister, whom he tenderly loved, and who had married early in life an Italian gentleman. Soon after her marriage, she had accompanied her husband into her native country, and for some years my father had very little communication with her. About the time I mentioned she died; and a few months afterwards he received a letter from her husband, acquainting him with his intention of marrying an Italian lady, and requesting my father to take charge of the infant Elizabeth, the only child of his deceased sister. “It is my wish,” he said, “that you should consider her as your own daughter, and educate her thus. Her mother’s fortune is secured to her, the documents of which I will commit to your keeping. Reflect upon this proposition; and decide whether you would prefer educating your niece yourself to her being brought up by a stepmother.”
My father did not hesitate, and immediately went to Italy, that he might accompany the little Elizabeth to her future home. I have often heard my mother say, that she was at that time the most beautiful child she had ever seen, and shewed signs even then of a gentle and affectionate disposition. These indications, and a desire to bind as closely as possible the ties of domestic love, determined my mother to consider Elizabeth as my future wife; a design which she never found reason to repent.
From this time Elizabeth Lavenza became my playfellow, and, as we grew older, my friend. She was docile and good tempered, yet gay and playful as a summer insect. Although she was lively and animated, her feelings were strong and deep, and her disposition uncommonly affectionate. No one could better enjoy liberty, yet no one could submit with more grace than she did to constraint and caprice. Her imagination was luxuriant, yet her capability of application was great. Her person was the image of her mind; her hazel eyes, although as lively as a bird’s possessed an attractive softness. Her figure was light and airy; and, though capable of enduring great fatigue, she appeared the most fragile creature in the world. While I admired her understanding and fancy, I loved to tend on her, as I should on a favourite animal; and I never saw so much grace both of person and mind united to so little pretension.
Every one adored Elizabeth. If the servants had any request to make, it was always through her intercession. We were strangers to any species of disunion and dispute; for although there was a great dissimilitude in our characters, there was an harmony in that very dissimilitude. I was more calm and philosophical than my companion; yet my temper was not so yielding. My application was of longer endurance; but it was not so severe whilst it endured. I delighted in investigating the facts relative to the actual world; she busied herself in following the aërial creations of the poets. The world was to me a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own.
My brothers were considerably younger than myself; but I had a friend in one of my schoolfellows, who compensated for this deficiency. Henry Clerval was the son of a merchant of Geneva, an intimate friend of my father. He was a boy of singular talent and fancy. I remember, when he was nine years old, he wrote a fairy tale, which was the delight and amazement of all his companions. His favourite study consisted in books of chivalry and romance; and when very young, I can remember, that we used to act plays composed by him out of these favourite books, the principal characters of which were Orlando, Robin Hood, Amadis, and St. George.
