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MARY SHELLY TOURING IN LONDON
St. Pancras and the real “birth” of Frankenstein

With the refurbishing of St. Pancras Station in London into the new international rail terminal for the Eurostar to Paris, this part of London which had been long fading into a working world stop on the London Underground is now finding itself a magnet for tourists and business travelers catching the high speed train to the continent (See Eurostar London-Paris). Yet, since now spending some idle time on St Pancras road, what is there to do aside from getting a coffee at the Starbucks next door or collecting tourist tickets and sim cards at the tourism center across the street?

Go on a search for literary and historical figures, whether real or imaginary. Take the bus a few stops to the Madam Tousaud’s Wax Museum always crowded as one of London’s top tourist stops. Stroll to the entirely tourism created Sherlock Holmes Museum at 221b Baker Street, a location having nothing to do with the character other than an address in the Conan Doyle stories which up until the late 1970’s was a dilapidated row house. Or go in search for a real ”birthplace” of the Frankenstein monster. Okay, so the monster is a creation of literature, famously written by a 19 year old Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly while on a European tour to Switzerland with her not-yet-husband Percy Bysshe Shelly (see Frankenstein Village). In an introduction to the Frankenstein novel, written with a later publishing Mary Shelly says the story came to her in a “dream” while staying in a house on Lake Geneva as part of a wager among the literarti of Lord Bryon, Percy Bysshe Shelly and John Polidori.

The real story behind literature's great gothic icon was even more a gothic soap opera than the book itself. The already famous poet Shelly first met Mary Godwin in London when she was sixteen, while visiting with her father, the writer and anarchist philosopher William Godwin who lived at 41 Skinner Street a few blocks up from the New St Pancras Parish Church on Euston Road. Mary’s mother Mary Wollstonecraft, a well known woman’s rights reformer and author died at Mary’s birth in 1797. Mary and Shelly spent time together taking walks to visit her mother’s grave. They very likely made love for the first time among the gravestones of St. Pancras Church graveyard. Mary was “disowned” by her father after his discovery of her affair with the married poet, evidenced by her pregnancy. Her first child died two months after being born while on their first trip to Europe. The second European tour when the famous weekend on Lake Geneva took place was after the birth of their second child. Shelly left his wife to go to Switzerland with Mary and her step sister Clair Claremont. Shelly’s wife, pregant by another man, committed suicide by drowning herself in the Serpentine creek in Hyde Park. Shelly and Mary married in December when she became Mary Shelly, taking her mother's maiden name Wollstonecraft for publishing purposes as her middle name rather than her father's.

The heart of the Frankenstein novel is as much a reflection on the darker nature of man than on its namesake monster, and seems to have come from the mind of a brilliant woman still a teenager in the crucible mixture of sex and graveyards, childbirth and death and the heady swirl of philosophical free thinkers and literary explorers of the early 19th Century. Mary Shelley's mother's grave and remains were removed from the cemetery at St Pancras to make way for the track of the original St Pancras Rail Station in the 1860's. Even more of the cemetery of the Old St Pancras Church were removed with great controversy for the reconstruction and modernization of the Eurostar Terminal at St. Pancras. The Old St Pancras Church originally gothic was one of the oldest in London, though the current one was rebuilt in Victorian times and sort of forgotten over time. It can be found on St Pancras Road behind the new terminal and the new British library.

To visit the London house Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly later lived for most of her life after Shelly's death in 1822 and where she died, hop on the tube at Kings Cross and take the Victoria Line to Victoria Station. The Mary Shelly House is a few blocks west of the Victoria Place Shopping Mall on Chester Square off Eccelstone Street. Mary Shelly is buried with her mother and father in the church graveyard in Bournemouth at St. Peter's Church, moved there by her son Sir Percy Shelly. Percey Bysshe Shelly is buried in Rome, at least his ashes. © Bargain Travel Europe

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See Also:

LONDON SIGHTSEEING BY BUS TOUR
Best Ways to See London from a Double-Decker

TOWER OF LONDON
Mind Your Head and the Family Jewels

LONDON'S BEST HISTORIC PUBS
Tour the Favorite Pubs of Literary and Historic Londoners

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