Garrison Keillor included these birthday notes today in his daily “Writer’s Almanac,” which is online and free.
It was on this day in 1818 that Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein was published (books by this author).
Two years before she had spent the summer in a cabin on Lake Geneva with her lover, Percy Bysshe Shelley, her sister Claire, and Claire’s lover, the poet Lord Byron. It rained a lot that summer, and one night, Byron suggested they all write ghost stories. At first Mary had trouble coming up with a story, but while lying in bed, reported having a waking nightmare, seeing a vision of a man reanimating a creature. She wrote: “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.” So she set to work on Frankenstein.
It’s the birthday of children’s author and illustrator Ezra Jack Keats (books by this author), born Jacob Ezra Katz in Brooklyn (1916). The son of impoverished Jewish immigrants from Warsaw, he wanted to be an artist, and that worried his family — but he couldn’t afford art school, so he got a job painting murals for the Works Progress Administration, and designed army camouflage during World War II.
The first book he wrote and illustrated on his own was The Snowy Day (1962), done all in collage, about a young black boy named Peter playing in his neighborhood after a new snowfall. It was one of the first children’s books to feature a black character. He went on to illustrate more than 80 children’s books, and to write and illustrate more than 20 books.
He said, “I love city life. All the beauty that other people see in country life, I find taking walks and seeing the multitudes of people.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Here I tell what I think is the breathtakingly interesting story of the origin of “Frankenstein”: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2020/01/11/alternative-history-what-if-the-frankenstein-story-were-true/
Great story, Bob. I have actually read that there were a series of volcanic eruptions over a couple of years that led up to the big one that produced the year without a summer.
Here’s a fuller account of Mary Godwin Shelley’s relationship with Percy Shelley. A précis: When they eloped via boat to Calais from England, he left behind his wife whom he had married when she was sixteen) and their daughter. It seems likely 16 year old Mary was already pregnant with Percy’s child, who died in infancy. Shelley’s first wife, Harriet, died by suicide in the same summer as Mary wrote Frankenstein.
https://lithub.com/the-treacherous-start-to-mary-and-percy-shelleys-marriage/
His treatment of Harriet was horrific.
As you will see from my piece, Christine, this is something I wrote for my high-school students, and my focus was on Mary and her book, so I didn’t go into any of that, which is pretty damning for Percy. But you have me thinking that for posting for a general audience on my blog, I should probably edit this a bit to be less effusive about Mr. Shelley.
Mr. Shelley was a privileged callow cad.
I used a text in high school for my advanced Native Spanish speakers which included a Latin American feminist writer’s perspective on Frankenstein. It included all these details and a few more. The kids found it fascinating.
If I can remember the name of the text or writer, I’ll post it.
Denis Smith of Ohio wrote today that there would be a third party ticket headed by Al Franken with Jill Stein as his VP. So there you have it. Vote Franken-Stein.
So Al is going back to his original line of employment – comedy!
Thanks, Christine.
I added a note about your objections regarding Percy Shelley to the post on my blog Christine. Thank you for raising this point.
Ha, Diane! The Frankenstein ticket. Hilarious!
And “The Snowy Day”! What a wonderful book!
From Mr. Keats himself, he recalled when he was five years old he drew a picture of a fire engine on the kitchen table. Fearing that his mother would be furious when she saw what he had done, he waited in dread until she returned. When she saw his picture, she gasped and said, “Ezra, did you draw this? It’s beautiful.” And his mother covered the drawing with a tablecloth, and when anyone came to visit his mother would remove the cloth and proudly proclaim, “Look what my Ezra drew!” Mr. Keats says his mother’s reaction to his fire engine drawing on the kitchen table encouraged him to continue in art. The rest is history. As Dr. Robert Crowe so wisely said, “Children tend to become what we tell them they are.”
What a wonderful story! Thanks for sharing!
Wasn’t John Polidori, a writer and for a time Byron’s personal physician, there too that fateful evening in the cabin on Lake Geneva?
Vila Diodoti, the home Byron rented, is a large home on the hill overlooking Lake Geneva. No longer open to the public, it has been turned into luxury apartments. It is near Montreux where I spent a summer some years ago. It is also near the Chateau de Chillon, the subject of Lord Byron’s famous poem, The Prisoner of Chillon.
Bob, I just read the notes you wrote for your students. They’re terrific.
You’re right of course that Bloom esteemed Percy Shelley above all other poets except Shakespeare. But I think John Keats was a better poet. I don’t know whether Percy would have agreed, but in his elegy for Keats, “Adonais,” the speaker calls Keats “the loveliest.”
“Frankenstein” would not exist without “Paradise Lost,” of which it is a strange retelling. (It is not a coincidence that the Creature learns English — and a frame by which he can understand his own predicament — by reading “Paradise Lost.”)
Thanks, Mr. Kulick! There are many reasons why my estimation of Mr. Shelley isn’t as high as was Mr. Bloom’s. His abominable behavior with women and his own children is one. Another is that he had some really bad ideas–a propensity for Platonism and determinism–and seems to have been quite confused philosophically. He had enormous gifts, but those are problems in my assessment of him. I can’t separate people from their work and don’t think that we should. (I can’t listen to Wagner without hearing innocents dying, for example.) But he was very, very young, and his support for the commons over and against the wealthy moves me, as does his brave defiance of religious superstition, which would have been greater still if he had rejected Plato’s airy nothings. Perhaps his behavior and emotional maturity would have grown with age to match his skill with words. We shall never know.