ABSTRACT
By the time Mary Shelley revised Frankenstein for republication in Colburn and Bentley's Standard Novels Series in 1831, her philosophical views had changed radically. 1 The 1831 Frankenstein is as different from the 1818 Frankenstein as Wordsworth's 1850 Prelude is different from his 1805 version, and in somewhat the same ways. By 1831, the deaths of her second daughter, her son William, and her husband, followed by Bryon's death and Jane Williams's betrayal of her friendship—together with her financially straightened circumstances and her guilt-ridden and unshakeable despair—all convinced Mary Shelley that human events are decided not by personal choice or free will but by material forces beyond our control. As she confessed to Jane Williams Hogg in August, 1827:
The power of Destiny I feel every day pressing more & more on me, & I yield myself a slave to it, in all except my moods of mind, which I endeavour to make independant of her, & thus to wreathe a chaplet, where all is not cypress, in spite of the Eumenides. 2
