Peter Ackroyd - The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

“A new kind of man?”

“You are laughing at me.”

“No. Believe me. I am not.”

“We cry more freely these days, do we not?”

“I have no standard of comparison. Ah, here is Bysshe.”

“I believe,” Bysshe said, laughing as he joined us, “that I was becoming an object of attention. There were comments.”

“You are an unusual sight in the neighbourhood.” Westbrook went over to the counter, and brought back Bysshe another tankard.

“Am I?” He seemed genuinely surprised, and it occurred to me that he was not aware of his own uniqueness. “One young man was eyeing my cane.”

“They are all poor, sir. But they mean you no harm. Most of them are honest enough.”

Bysshe seemed embarrassed. “Forgive me. I did not mean to impugn their honesty-” He drank quickly from his tankard.

“I am surprised,” I said, “that they are not howling with rage.”

“What was that, Victor?”

“If I were forced to live in abject horror, while those around me were dripping with riches, I would wish to tear this city down stone by stone. I would wish to destroy the world that imprisoned me. That created me.”

“Well said.” Westbrook raised his tankard to me. “I have often wondered what keeps these poor men in servitude.”

“Religion,” Bysshe said.

“No. Not that. They are not impressed by anything of that kind. They are as pagan as the men of Africa.”

“I am glad to hear it,” Bysshe replied. “Let us drink to the death of Christianity.”

“No,” Westbrook said. “It is the fear of punishment. The fear of the gallows.”

“What do they gain from life?” I asked him. I was becoming drunk on the stingo.

“Life itself,” Westbrook replied.

“That is enough, I think.” Bysshe had gone over to the counter, and brought back three more tankards. “Life is its own value. There is nothing more precious.”

“Yet,” Westbrook said, “it could be led with dignity. And without suffering.”

“I wish that were possible in this life.” Bysshe raised his tankard. “Health to you all.”

“What do you mean?” Westbrook asked him.

“Suffering is intrinsic to human existence. There is no joy without its attendant pain.”

“It need not be,” I said. “We must create a new standard of value. That is all.”

“Oh, you will transform nature, will you, Victor?”

“If necessary. Yes.”

“Bravo. Victor Frankenstein will create a new kind of man!”

“You have always told me, Bysshe, that we must find the unfindable. Gain the unattainable.”

“I do believe that. We are all agreed upon it, I think. Yet to remove suffering itself-”

“What if there were a new race of beings,” Westbrook asked, “who could not feel pain or grief? They would be terrible.”

I took his arm. “Is not St. Giles, where we walked, more terrible still? Is it not?”

We continued our drinking and, I believe, aroused some comment from the clerks and tradesmen who were sitting on other benches. It was a more respectable neighbourhood than that of St. Giles adjoining, but the presence of gentlemen was not necessarily welcomed. “We should go now,” Westbrook said. He took Bysshe’s arm, and helped him from the seat. “I think, Mr. Shelley, you should visit my father another time. He is not a friend to drink.”

“What of your sister? What of Harriet?” Bysshe stood uncertainly on his feet.

“Two or three days will make no conceivable difference, I assure you. Come now. And you, too, Mr. Frankenstein. I will find you both a cab in St. Martin ’s Lane.”

I HAD AVIDLY READ ACCOUNTS in Blackwood’s Magazine of Mr. Humphry Davy’s work, and had managed at Oxford to obtain a copy of the Proceedings of the Royal Society in which he explained the process by which he had galvanised a cat. Quite by chance I opened a copy of the Gentleman’s Magazine , two or three days after arriving in London, and saw there advertised a course of lectures by Mr. Davy at the Society for the Encouragement of Arts and Manufactures under the title “Electricity Not Mysterious.”

When I attended the first lecture, having purchased a ticket for the entire series at the door, I was surprised to find that the hall of the Society was all but full. Mr. Davy was younger than I expected, fresh-faced, keen and quick in all his movements; the young men in the audience held their hats upon their knees, and strained forward to watch him. He was preparing some galvanic batteries on a table while, on the opposite side of the raised stage, there was a cylindrical device that glistened in the light of the oil-lamps.

Mr. Davy seemed to have the temperament of an artist. He spoke of the electrical current as a fulfilment of the Greek philosophers’ proposition that there is a fire within all things. He called it the spark of life, the Promethean flame, and the light of the world. “Pray do not be alarmed,” he said. “Nothing will touch you or harm you in any way.” Then he connected the galvanic equipment and, at the touch of his hand, a great arc of flashing light crossed from one table to the other. Two or three ladies shrieked, only to be rebuked by their companions with laughter, but there was a general fervour and excitement in the hall. I blinked, but there was still an after-image of the flash upon my retina; it seemed that I had looked into the heart of creation.

“It is over,” Mr. Davy said in reassurance to the ladies. “It is gone. But it is infinitely repeatable.” There was a slight smell of burning, or of singeing, in the air. “We have come to no harm,” he continued, “because electricity is the most natural force in the world. In truth it is the natural force. To my reckoning, like air and water, it is one of the constituents of life. It may be one of the principal means of begetting life. The electrical fluid itself is infinitely sensitive and subtle. It works with miraculous effect in the aether, yet it also flows through the human frame silently and invisibly. Dr. Darwin, who very sensibly proposed the differentiation between vitreous and resinous electricity according to their seats of operation, preserved a piece of vermicelli in an electrical case until it began to move with voluntary motion. What could then not be achieved with the human organs under like conditions?”

Mr. Davy went on to describe the curious experiments of the Scottish galvanist, James Macpherson, who had been given especial permission by the Company of Surgeons to be present at the dissection of a felon in Surgeons’ Hall. The body had been taken fresh from the gallows at Newgate and delivered while it was still warm; the hanged man was young, the murderer of his mother, and there was no popular execration against the use of his body. The corpse was laid flat upon the wooden slab in the middle of the hall. Eager students were sitting around it in what can only be described as the theatre of operations. I began to feel a prickling sensation down my back: I believed that I could see it all before me.

Mr. Macpherson attached electrical wires, altogether slender and pliable, to the extremities of the corpse. When the galvanic equipment was brought into operation the body shuddered and then, with no principle of movement apparent, rolled itself into a tight ball. The head, according to Mr. Davy, was between the legs of the young man and the hands tightly clenched. He compared it to the image of an abortive infant taken from the womb. Like many others in the audience, I am sure, I listened with horror as Mr. Davy explained how the body could not be unravelled and how in this clenched and unnatural posture it was consigned to the lime pit in the grounds of Newgate Prison. Such was the power of the electrical current.