“Invisible Hands”: Paltock, Milton, and the Critique of Providence in Frankenstein

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1See Robinson, “Frankenstein Chronicles” (1.lxxvi-lxxxi) for a detailed analysis of when Mary began writing a lost, shorter ur-text, which was apparently transformed a short time later into a much longer version that resulted in the text we know of as the 1818 edition of Frankenstein. 2Rieger's edition will serve as the source for the 1818 edition of Frankenstein. All quotations from the 1816–17 MS will be from Robinson's edition of The Frankenstein Notebooks and designated as such in parenthetical citations by FN. 3For various views on Percy Shelley's role in the composition of Frankenstein, see Mellor (57–69), Leader (167–205), and Robinson's “Introduction” (24–32). None of those critics discuss emendations that are the main focus of the present article (the “invisible hand” passages and Percy's “Providentializing” of the Creature's reaction to Paradise Lost). 4See Viner for a wide-ranging intellectual history of the concept of Providence in Western culture. 5The evidence for the “invisible hand” references in Frankenstein being allusions to Adam Smith's famous description of the “invisible hand” of the free market transforming private greed into public good in The Theory of Moral Sentiments ([1759] 184–85) and The Wealth of Nations ([1776] 1.456) is not convincing. The Creature never read Smith's writings or any allusions to them. There is no mention of Smith's works in the detailed (but not exhaustive) entries and reading lists in Mary's journals. Percy Shelley's letters only mention Smith once, on February 6, 1811, when the young iconoclast, in an effort to deride his father's belief in Christian orthodoxy, characterizes the famous economist—along with Voltaire, Lord Kames, Hume, Rousseau, and Benjamin Franklin—as “Deists, the life of all of whom was characterized by the strictest morality” (1.50–51). Although Percy and Mary encountered allusions to The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations during pre-Frankenstein readings of William Godwin's Political Justice (1793) and Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) (Sunstein, 53–54; Journals 1.22, 28–37, 85; 2.649, 684), there were no references to Smith's “invisible hand” passages by either Godwin or Wollstonecraft. Mary and Percy read Paradise Lost in 1815, and Percy read the poem aloud to Mary in November of 1816, immediately before Mary began writing the Creature's narrative [Journals 1.89, 96; 146–47; 2.663; Robinson, “Frankenstein Chronology” lxxiii]).