Summary

Chapter 18 picks up with Mary and Percy Shelley in Italy a year after Frankenstein has been published. Mary Shelley is depressed because her son Will has recently died. Her daughter died of a fever before Will died and, in Rome, she lost Will to an infection in 1819. Mary Shelley also alludes to losing another child, perhaps to miscarriage. Mary Shelley is only 22 years old and she is pregnant again, unsure if she can bear the reality. Percy Shelley begs Mary to get out of bed.

Percy Shelley comes in one morning and tells Mary about a massacre in Manchester called Peterloo, which gets her to sit up. Mary Shelley believes the English Corn Laws, which a group of 100,000 workers protested in Manchester, benefit the gentleman farmers while the poor starve. The newspaper Percy Shelley is reading reports the protestors were peaceful, but the...