‘Frankenstein’: The Shelley’s and The Peterloo Massacre
A literary work may well at first apprehension, because of its physical manifestation, seem to be an autonomous creation, above and beyond the historical process, but to fully decipher and unlock its full meaning we must avail ourselves of the time in which it was made for there is no literary text that is independent of the historical moment in which it was born, just as there is no human being who can escape being the product of their age.
The period of English and to a certain extent European history from the French Revolution of 1789 to the passing of The Reform Bill in 1832 in England was one of social, economic, and political turbulence. After 1832 there was a period of relative social stability, but before this, the project of progress and the Enlightenment had unleashed forces of such monstrosity that it threatened to unravel and destroy that very project. This is very much the theme of Frankenstein.
The publication of Frankenstein in 1818 was just after the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 which has been seen as the climactic final event of The French Revolution. Yet the only mention of an actual revolution in Frankenstein is during Victor Frankenstein’s journey to Scotland with his friend Henry Clerval when whilst in Oxford he meditates upon the English Revolution of 1642 which took place over a century and a half prior to the events of the novel:
‘From thence we proceeded to Oxford. As we entered this city, our minds were filled with the remembrance of the events that had been transacted there more than a century and a half before. It was here that Charles I. had collected his forces. This city had remained faithful to him, after the whole nation had forsaken his cause to join the standard of Parliament and liberty. The memory of that unfortunate king and his companions, the amiable Falkland, the insolent Goring, his queen, and son, gave a peculiar interest to every part of the city which they might be supposed to have inhabited.’
More surprisingly, given what we know of Mary Shelley’s political sympathies the tone is very much in support of Charles I, a monarch, regarded by even the Whigs (liberals of their day) let alone by the Radicals of Shelley’s circle as being the very personification of a Zeus-like tyrant, prepared to do anything in order to keep the established order and absolute monarchical authority secure. The substitution by Mary Shelley of the English Revolution of one hundred and fifty years earlier, before the still contemporaneous reverberations of the French Revolution and the odd political interpretation given by her, are discrepancies, that will take us closer to the truth of what this book is really all about and the history that made it possible.
What Mary Shelley omits is as important, for those detectives of the mind and meaning, as what she includes. Both the English and the French revolutions were (failed) attempts to create a new social order based respectively on justice and then on reason. These Promethean movements in both countries were attempting to remove the absolutist monarchies and replace the old order with a new elite who had been excluded from power by mobilizing the plebeian masses (peasants, workers and the urban poor). But, in doing so they found they had created a monster that they could not control.
The proliferation of demands from these masses now that their voice could be heard at last was too much for the middle-class revolutionaries who were unable to control this sudden outburst of real revolutionary fervour. The Enlightenment far from having led to the reign of reason had unloosed elemental forces that would end in terror.
In England at the same time there was a period of similar social crisis with revolution taking hold. But this was of a different form entirely. This was the Industrial Revolution and its devastating negative impact this time would be mainly upon the plebeian masses. Increased unemployment, falling wages and rising prices for food and other resources (plus ca change) were the economic conditions that grew alongside the ever-increasing prosperity and wealth of the employing class. This contradictory development of capitalism had seen the order of the rural economy now transform into the class conflict of a new industrial order. According to historian E.P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class, ‘‘the outstanding fact of the period 1790 to 1830 is the formation of ‘the working class’’ a social force aware of its own interests and prepared to act on them in opposition to the dominant ruling class.
The English working class was now entering the scene kicking and screaming. Its first action between 1811 and 1813 was mighty and memorable, when workers particularly in the textile industry began to protest against the use of new technologies which would destroy communities and eventually make the workers themselves obsolete. They resisted with violence. The Luddites sacked factories and smashed the ‘labour-saving’ machines. The movement was violently repressed by the British state and many Luddites were transported to Australia as punishment.
However, it was followed by mass demonstrations against high rents and prices and will be forever marked in history by the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester on 16th August 1819 when 15 people were killed and between 400–700 injured. This massacre was named in ‘honour’ of The Battle of Waterloo in ironic comparison. At the very same time as Frankenstein was being published the British state was suspending many civil liberties in an attempt to combat the increasing political protests from working poor and the unemployed. Mary Shelley’s story bears witness to the birth of this political monster.
The proletariat is as nameless as the monster is. An assemblage of many different parts from the industrial working class. A product of its own time as much as the monster is and both a product of the technological progress of that society in its first phase of industrial capitalism. When the monster describes his suffering and solitude (alone on the world’s crag) and evinces our pity is this not Mary Shelley giving voice to the voiceless, the mass oppressed and pitifully poor?
That same combination of pity and terror can be discovered in a poem written by Percy Bysshe Shelley as a response to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, The Mask of Anarchy. This poem was never published during Shelley’s lifetime and was published only in 1832. Mary Shelley wrote an explanatory note to explain why. The final stanza of Shelley’s magnificent poem reads:
‘Rise, like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth, like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you:
Ye are many — they are few!’
Both Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus and The Mask of Anarchy encourages this new political ‘monster’ to rise up and challenge the tyranny that they were facing every day of their lives. But his fear of unleashing the terror of the French Revolution in England made him hold back from supporting a violent struggle against the undeniable injustices faced by the many at the hands of the few.
Aldous Huxley in his book An Encyclopaedia of Pacifism stated: “The Method of resistance inculcated in by Shelley in The Mask of Anarchy is the method of non-violence”. The rallying language of the poem has led to elements of it being used by political movements throughout the world. It was recited by students at the Tianaenmen Square protests in China and by protesters in Tahrir Square during the revolution in Egypt in 2011.
The phrase “like lions after slumber, in unvanquishable number” from the poem is used as a motto by the International Socialist Organisation in their mouthpiece. The line “Ye are many/they are few” inspired the campaign slogan “We are many, they are few” used by protesters during the Poll Tax demonstrations of 1989–90 in the United Kingdom, and also inspired the title of the 2014 documentary film We Are Many, which focused on the worldwide anti-war protests of 2003. Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the British Labour Party, memorably quoted the final stanza from the poem at his rally in Islington, North London on the final day of campaigning for the UK General Election in 2017. He subsequently quoted the final stanza again during his powerful speech on the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury in 2017.
It was Shelley’s dread that the working class would take its bloody revenge upon the ruling class and bring to England a reign of terror not equalled since The French Revolution. Is this very same dilemma not presented in the story of Frankenstein? The proletarian ‘monster’ is born at the same time and in the same place. They are born through technology and industrial progress both gifted to us in the first flames of Promethean transgression. The very logic of capitalism has created the means of its own destruction: the industrial working class whose interests are diametrically opposed to those of capital and who are judged ‘ugly’ and ‘hideous’ in the eyes of their creators. Even the radicals of Mary Shelley’s milieu could not see through the irrational fear, not even by listening to that very Monster, eloquently explain its plight and the plight of the proletariat all over the world:
‘I learned that the possessions most esteemed by your fellow creatures were high and unsullied descent united with riches. A man might be respected with only one of these advantages, but without either he was considered, except in very rare instances, as a vagabond and a slave, doomed to waste his powers for the profits of the chosen few! And what was I? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant, but I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I was, besides, endued with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even of the same nature as man. I was more agile than they and could subsist upon coarser diet; I bore the extremes of heat and cold with less injury to my frame; my stature far exceeded theirs. When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?’
This speech would have resonated deeply with the huge crowds at Peterloo. It is at this moment that we can clearly see the correlations and relations that link the monster to the industrial proletariat: an unnatural creation made from a collection of identities fused together to form a singular being without a history and unique in its very existence. The monster is never directly identified with the working class by Mary Shelley but only through its absence much like the dog that did not bark in the night-time.
Written before the colossal works of political economy by Marx and the profound sociological analyses of Engels in Manchester, her novel prophetically articulates the oppression and dehumanising effects of capitalism already at work in society. This historical reality is undoubtedly inscribed within the work. As Marx and Engels were to write in The Communist Manifesto, ‘‘class struggle is the motor of history’’ and the struggle literally to the death between Dr Frankenstein and the monster surely encapsulates this with dramatic clarity. Mary Shelley would have seen the violence of these new working-class movements such as the Luddites, towards the middle class as well as the aristocracy and she presents these fears to us in her novel. The Modern Prometheus of science and progress (19th- century capitalism) has lead inexorably to the birth of a New Prometheus, a new ‘‘race of devils’’, exploding outwards from the very insides of industrial capitalism and, as Marx would later predict in his works, eventually result in capitalism’s replacement by its very own, self-produced, nemesis, the proletariat.
We have moved from the Promethean act of creation in a horror story to a very real event that is foreshadowed in the very same novel. The fear and loathing that Dr Frankenstein feels for his creation is mirrored in Mary Shelley’s fear at the rise of a new race of creatures formed from that same Promethean process that will violently dethrone the ruling class.
The French Revolution casts a long shadow across both Percy and Mary Shelley and their literary elucidation of a monstrous creation of pure excess, unable to be controlled and manipulated by those very same middle-class radicals. The interaction between Dr Frankenstein and the Monster is a reflection through a dark mirror of the struggles between the ruling class and the new proletariat. Dr Frankenstein is disgusted at the ugliness of his first born, its realness is too much for his class sensibilities. Prometheus made man in his own image as did the God of the Old Testament. God has no aesthetic issue with Adam, but Dr Frankenstein seemingly has an aesthetic problem with his ‘Adam’ yet, he is made from other men, from other Adam’s. It is not an aesthetic issue it is a political issue. The Monster is more than a single individual because he is composed of many people. This unity of many parts is his strength. He is not one he is many, and he has great physical power because of it and Dr Frankenstein is just as overwhelmed and as unable to control such a monster as the French Bourbon State was. Dr Frankenstein is now himself locked in a class struggle with his Monster to the death.
The Modern (political) Prometheus (Capitalism) has generated a New Prometheus (Proletariat) and due to inherent contradictions within its operation, (the exploitation and dehumanisation of the workers), it will inevitably (according to Marxian dialectics) face a systemic existential threat to its hegemony.
The Peterloo Massacre should be seen as this inherent contradiction coming to the surface and being seen and heard in broad daylight. This Promethean class struggle did not begin at Peterloo for it was already well underway but what took place at Peterloo on 16th August 1819 was undoubtedly the first united response by organised labour, en masse, to challenge the exploitation of the working class and confront the existing power relations in England.
It had no violent revolutionary intent whatsoever, yet the fear that such a large gathering of the people (which included large numbers of women) engendered into the bourgeoisie and the ruling political class, was such, that it was considered a threat to their very way of life and to be stopped by the use of a military force last seen in action at the Battle of Waterloo. It is no exaggeration to state that this tragic event and the sacrifice of so many, was critical, to the freedoms, we take for granted, today.
