Lock of Mary Shelley’s hair

MATHELINDA NABUGODI: Frankenstein’s creature is described as being very ugly, and strikes everyone with horror, because it’s a person made of corpses’ parts—but he has very beautiful hair. And teeth. And that’s of course because those are the parts of the body that don’t rot.  

NEIL GAIMAN: Dr. Mathelinda Nabugodi is a lecturer in comparative literature at University College London. She uncovers the origins of a selection of extraordinary literary relics in her forthcoming book, The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive.

NABUGODI: What we have here is a first edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s famous novel, together with a lock of her hair. Both of these objects were given as gifts to the same person, whose name was Thomas Jefferson Hogg.

Thomas Jefferson Hogg was one of Percy Shelley’s best friends from university. And Shelley actually had this vision, because he was into free love, so he really wanted Mary Shelley and Thomas Jefferson Hogg to end up being a couple as well. A “throuple,” I think it’s called today.

Mary Shelley sent this lock of hair together with a letter to Hogg. Well, he was interested in her, but she was not that into him. So basically she’s saying, “You know, I really like you, but I’m just not feeling it, and by the way, have some of my hair instead.”  

GAIMAN: Today it might be rather strange to mail someone a lock of your hair, but in the early 19th century it was in many places a common practice.

NABUGODI: Hair was something that was very often exchanged. It was a very intimate gift; you would give it to your lover, you would give it to a close friend, you would give it to a family member. So it’s a bit of you that the other person can keep.

GAIMAN: And the trend of hair gifting happened to coincide with what we now recognize as the birth of celebrity culture. 

NABUGODI: People were exchanging hair as an intimate gift, but at the same time people became more and more interested in authors, and famous people, so alongside this practice of exchanging hair with someone you love comes this interest in collecting hair from famous people. What that means for us today is that any literary archive often has quite big masses of literary locks. You will find Mary Shelley’s hair in almost all the major libraries that hold Shelley manuscripts. And that’s all quite interesting to think that this hair is scattered across the globe, but once upon a time it all grew on the same head, as it were.