ABSTRACT
In 1791, Constantin-François Volney, deputy to the Assemblée Nationale of 1789, published his Les Ruines; ou, Méditation sur les révolutions des Empires. A materialist polemic on the government of empires, structured as a comparative study of religions and framed as a visionary dialogue with a ghost, Les Ruines was first issued in England the next year by Joseph Johnson, publisher of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and other dissenting writers, in a translation by Godwin’s close friend, James Marshall.1 The bestselling Ruins of Empire, reissued through the nineteenth century in cheap pocketbook editions and widely circulated in excerpted tracts, was an influential Jacobin sourcebook for nineteenth-century radicalism.2 Godwin read Volney’s book in 1797 and rejected it for what he saw as its bombastic simplifications. In contrast, Percy Bysshe Shelley incorporated the adored volume into “Queen Mab” (1812-13) and “The Revolt of Islam,” written during the same 1816-17 period that gave rise to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the period of her own reading, or rereading, of The Ruins.3 But the most important reader of Volney’s meditation, in the original French, was the creature created by Victor Frankenstein; for it is the book from which he receives his instruction in “the science of letters,” as he eavesdrops on the young Felix’s tutorial with the Arabian refugee Safie, two exiles from post-revolutionary Paris, cosmopolites retired against their will to an isolated cottage near Ingolstadt, in Bavaria, just north of the Swiss border.
