Shelley's Ghost

Halfway through Mary Shelley’s novel, Victor Frankenstein and his friend Clerval travel to England. This draft passage describes their visit to Oxford. They are charmed by the city, and amused by its strange rules, ‘which although they might excite the laughter of a stranger were looked upon in the world of the university as matters of the utmost consequence’. Two students, they learn, are obstinately wearing ‘light coloured pantaloons when it was the rule of the colledge to wear dark’, and are in danger of being expelled for the offence.

Mary had been shown round Oxford by Shelley in 1815. They had visited the Bodleian, the Clarendon Press (now the Clarendon Building), and Shelley’s old rooms at University College. They were accompanied by Thomas Love Peacock and Mary’s step-brother Charles Clairmont. After their return Charles Clairmont described the expedition to his sister Claire:

We spent the next morning in a more intimate investigation of the beauties of the Architecture, & the shape & situation of the Town; we saw the Bodleian Library, the Clarendon Press, & walked through Quadrangles of the different Colleges; we visited the very rooms where the two noted infidels Shelley & Hogg (now happily excluded the society of the present residents, those virtuous devotees of voluptuo[u]sness & ease, and extortion and deceit and blindness), poured with the incessant & unwearied application of an Alchemyst over the artificial & natural boundaries of human knowledge; brooded over the perceptions which were the offspring of their villainous & impudent penetration & even dared to threaten the World with the horrid & diabolical project of telling mankind to open its eye. I am sure you will duely apreciate the sagacity & rigid justice of the directors, whose anxiety for the commonweal led them to excommunicate such impious monsters.