Orientation to the Frankenstein Variorum Project

Explore the Frankenstein Variorum Project and related resources and background:

PSU Behrend campus news article: https://behrend.psu.edu/feature/digital-text-brings-new-life-frankenstein
Distant view of the whole novel and its 5 versions: https://slides.com/elisabeshero-bondar/frankie#/0/30
my slideshow: https://slides.com/elisabeshero-bondar/frankie (This gets a little technical sometimes--but see if you can follow the gist of what we're trying to do.)

How to read the Variorum Frankenstein:

Open the Variorum Viewer to the first fragment available of the 1816 manuscript, and begin exploring that first page. (Here is the Shelley-Godwin Archive view of that page.)
Then select any of the other versions and begin reading Frankenstein from section 1 through the first 3 or 4 sections this week.
Click on passages highlighted in grey as variants and take note of any particularly interesting alterations that make a substantial change to the way we read a passage. Come prepared to share at least one of these in class discussion.
Try toggling the various kinds of notes to see the manicule notes view as well.

What to discuss here (options): Address two or three of the following:

Locate one or two passages in which you noticed that the versions are quite significantly different from one another. What kinds of serious changes do you see the author making over her text?
What kinds of small changes also seem worth noticing, and might affect the way we read?
Version differences worth noting: The Manuscript Notebook is missing the opening sections and begins late. When that begins: what changes do you think are especially significant from the notebook to the print publication of 1818?
What do you think Mary Shelley was doing with the Thomas Copy edition? How do these changes compare / contrast with what she altered in the 1831 edition?
What do you notice about the "user experience" of investigating the Frankenstein Variorum Viewer? Does the interface help you to make interesting discoveries? Or where does it become distracting or cumbersome? What aspects of the reading interface do you think we should try to improve? Share screen captures that show interesting and/or problematic aspects of the interface.

The most significant differences I see between the MS Notebook version and the print 1818 publication version is, for one, the fact of the obviously very rough-draft nature of the MS version - there words, phrases, and sometimes even whole sentences crossed out of the MS version. Noting this, there are chunks in the MS version that are crossed out partially, but wholly replaced by something completely different in the 1818 version and beyond. Things were shortened, or paraphrased, or otherwise cut to make some of the original notebook's wording more succinct and less "wordy." The 1831 version is the only exception - there are some variations between the MS and 1831 edition where the 1831 edition actually has whole paragraphs added in that the manuscript version did not have at all. Another significant note is the separation of chapters within the MS version. The manuscript divides up the chapters in a much different way than the following versions do. For example, in section 7, the MS version notes the beginning of Chapter 2 in the middle - where the rest of the versions are still in Chapter 1. These mismatching chapters occur throughout the entirety of the manuscript version, and I could see how this would present some unique challenged to the back end coding and chunking of the manuscript!

Now looking at the Thomas edition, which is really the 1818 edition but with Mary Shelley's handwritten marginalia of notes and edits, with her friend (Percy?)'s notes and suggestions written in the marginalia as well. There are smaller words and phrases that are crossed out, which are simply replaced by other words or slightly different ways of saying the same thing, probably for clarity. But, there are also considerably large chunks and whole passages that are crossed out in the Thomas section as well. It seems that a lot of these larger portions of crossed-out passages have lengthy, emotionally detailed, and quite flowery descriptions of certain characters and their backgrounds. For example, in section 7, there's a whole passage that goes into how happy the narrator's childhood was that is crossed out entirely, with just the word "bad" at the end of it. There's another passage in a previous section where a rather large section of flowery descriptions of the narrator's feelings towards their French guest is also crossed out. This makes me think that either Shelley herself or Percy (or both) were trying to eliminate parts of the book where things get too... feminine? I'd imagine, possibly to ensure that no readers would correctly assume that the author is a woman, and therefore prevent her novel from being ignored on the premise that the author is a lady, because sexism was the norm back then.

@am0eba-byte @wdjacca Percy's edits are only in the manuscript notebooks from 1816.

Thomas copy is, we believe, Mary Shelley's (MWS's) handwriting on a print copy of her 1818 published book.

Who's Percy? Well, he's the rebel poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who courted Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin famously over her mother's grave (true story)! Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (a famous early feminist tract from the 1790s), who died giving birth to MWS in 1797. Her father was [William Godwin, a radical bookseller in London and author of radical philosophy and revolutionary novels. Read more about Mary's revolutionary parents: https://wordsworth.org.uk/blog/2015/10/04/william-godwin-political-justice-anarchism-and-the-romantics/

There's a long story about all this, but basically MWS was a teenage daughter of radical revolutionary parents, who never knew her mother except through her writings...and Percy Shelley was a rebel poet who got himself expelled from Oxford University for writing a pamphlet titled "The Necessity of Atheism" (that sort of heretical thing would totally get you expelled in those days). Percy was interested in the Godwin - Wollstonecraft family and, yes, courted MWS in a London city graveyard before the two ran away together, and Mary was basically a teenage runaway and unwed mother during the same decade when Jane Austen was writing her prim and proper novels. (Isn't it funny that this is all happening during the time of Pride & Prejudice?)

Here's a reasonably good place to read more about all the wonderful, interesting people involved in the first making of Frankenstein here: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/arts-and-books/sumer-1816-frankenstein-shelley-byron-villa-diodati

Eventually they travel to Europe, taking MWS's half-sister Claire Clairmont with them (that's a long story, too...) They would stay with another rebel poet, Lord Byron, who had gotten himself exiled from England over a nasty breakup with his wife (that's complicated too). Byron was considered "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" and therefore attracted a LOT of attention (his long narrative semi-autobiographical poems sold like mad among the women of England and Europe). You can read more about Byron's exciting life here: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lord-Byron-poet

In that summer of 1816 was a famous "ghost story challenge": Mary and Percy and Claire were all visiting Byron in Switzerland during the infamously cold, dark summer of 1816 (darkened from the volcanic eruption of Mt. Tambora halfway around the world in Indonesia--it made summer wintry as far away as North America)! So, they all stayed inside Byron's chateau on the shores of Lake Leman, and someone in their group issued a ghost story challenge: Who could write the scariest ghost story? Everyone took up something, but Mary's was the story that stuck. By the time she'd been there, she'd already lost an infant child and lots of scholars think that experience has something to do with Victor's determination to end death in his scientific quest to make the Creature.

This is, by the way, widely considered one of the first modern works of science fiction. Its author was writing something quite unusual, experimenting with new sciences of the time: everyone was excited about new experiments showing that animal bodies conduct electrical impulses --nerve energies--and that electricity, the stuff of lightning, was what courses through all life. Scientists of the time sometimes wrote politically that the knowledge of electricity should "level" inequality in society, to know that all of us share a common "fluid" force--electricity.

There's SO much more, but...maybe this is a start!

The MS version, while including the crossed-out words that the author chose to not include or simply misspelt, often seemed to have a lot more emotion and detail than the other versions. For example, the MS version included more descriptive words and adjectives, such as luxuriances”, “dun skin”, “convulsed”, which were later either completely left out of the passage, or replaced with other less descriptive and “generic” terms. The MS version, in my opinion, shows more color and emotion of the author with the language use, that the other versions lack in some cases.
In a way, the MS version made sense to have a lot of words and descriptions, I understood it as the author was simply writing down all the thoughts that went through her mind and the other versions made edits to reduce the length of the book and make the wording more precise. This mindset is also what I understood from the large chunks of missing paragraphs and passages that were added in from the other versions that the manuscript did not have.

One small change that does not really affect the content of the passage, but more so the future uses of the passage is the changed chapter numbers. For example, Chapter 7 in MS is actually chapter 4 in 1818, 1823 and in Thomas’s edition, while it is chapter 5 in 1831’s edition. While in a whole, the changed chapter number of the same passage may not be that significant, it may affect future research or education purposes of the passage. When I saw this change, the immediate thought that came to my mind was how difficult it would be for teachers to teach about the book in school if students didn’t all have the same version of the book, which was often the case in my high school in Hong Kong. The other small changes are the punctuations that were differing between the editions, which is interesting to see. The differences in the punctuation usage, to me, signifies the power of a simple comma or period and its place in the English language and the novel, seeing as the punctuation can be used to help tell the story.

The missing parts of the manuscript could've displayed more intimate and emotional writing from the author, given that the first few sections of the manuscript would be similar to the first few sections of the 1818 edition. If we had those parts, some of the changes that can be seen in the later sections maybe could've been explained and a trend or pattern could've been seen from the original manuscript to the 1818 edition in regards to the variations.

While the interface of the Variorum helped me make some interesting discoveries and gave a clear visualization of the changes that occurred throughout the editions, it was sometimes hard for me to understand just what the sentence would’ve been with all the changes in the editions. I understand that the words and structure was changed, but for some of the sentences, the rephrased sentence that I interpreted from the information I saw was complete gibberish, which led me to think I probably understood the sentence wrong. Maybe a sentence within the annotations that show the full complete sentence or phrase in that particular section would help.

Another thing that is very minor about the UI experience and might just be a slight pet peeve of mine are the target for some of the links. When clicking on some the links, e.g. the Shelley-Godwin Archive link, the link does not open in a new tab or window, so it makes it a little difficult sometimes to navigate quickly between the pages.

@wdjacca This is a good beginning with encountering the Variorum! I especially appreciate the issue of how the variants are rendered in the interface (and how they can be read back into the text). We need to think about that carefully, though it will hinge on the "back end" work we are doing, too. Also, yes, the way we are handling links needs to change, and we'll get into that discussion with our collaborator @raffazizzi soon!

For now, I think I'm going to direct you and @am0eba-byte to this page as I guide you into the text and XML structures that are holding the digital edition together: https://frankensteinvariorum.github.io/fv-collation/

@am0eba-byte @wdjacca Here is a set of slides I've prepped to help guide us in our orientation walk this morning! http://bit.ly/fv-backend

FrankensteinVariorum / fv-collation