HORROR FICTION

Frankenstein

Earlier there had been the tradition of writing about the homunculus.

Mary Shelley's father had written a number of novels and acquired a number of acolytes. When Frankenstein was published was published anonymously some reviewers recognised that the novel had elements of the philosophical outlook of her father William Godwin.

Her mother had written about the rights of people to exist autonomously. She wrote about the rights of creation.

In 1815 Mount Tambora, a volcano in the Dutch East Indies, erupted. This had the effect of disrupting global weather systems. 1816 became known as the year without summer . During it, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and Mary's sister Claire Clairmont visited Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati on the shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Also resident at the property was the baron's physician John Polidori. At the peer's prompting, the party set themselves to writing short stories about supernatural phenomena. Mary Godwin's tale drew upon debates that were then current in the scientific world about whether electricity could be used to generate life in lifeless flesh.

At the end of the year Godwin and Shelley married one another. With the poet's encouragement, she worked up her story into a full-length novel. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) was published anonymously. 500 copies were printed. She sought to maintain the work s appeal. Therefore, its text underwent a series of adjustments as it passed through different editions. In 1831 her name appeared upon an edition of the book for the first time.

Mary s mother had died a few days after giving birth to her. Frankenstein investigates the limits of life and death because his mother had died of scarlet fever. While writing the book she lost a child and experienced a couple of suicides.

The epitaph is Milton's Adam. (Psalms 137: By the waters of Babylon I wept.) The Creature shifts his identity between Adam and Satan.

Frankenstein is the point at which monsters transition from being horrendous and patently non-humanoid to become humanoid.

Frankenstein was about weird science rather than the Gothic. Because of her parents she was concerned about rights and responsibilities. The book touched upon animal rights, the creature was composed of animal parts as well as human ones. He was aware that he was a cross-species hybrid.

The word Frankenstein swiftly entered into usage. It was employed in Parliament as early when the Tory Foreign Secretary Geore Canning used it in an analogous manner during a debate about the abolition of slavery.

Each version became more censored, with the scientific element reduced. In the original novel the monster was eloquent. The two 1823 stage adaptations made it silent. The 1831 edition incorporated this change. There was a religious revival. The 1831 edition made clear that the idea was wicked; the doctor became a much less ambivalent character whom regretted his actions and thus became a person with whom the audience could identify.

Her imagery of the mad scientist predated the coining of the word scientist by William Whewellin 1833.

Mary Shelley identified Byron with the Creature. It was Deformed, rejected, and fatally destructive . In 2012 it emerged that the copy of The Modern Prometheus that the novelist had given to the poet had been discovered in the library of the late Douglas Jay. He had been a senior Labour politician and minister.

Location: 24 Chester Square, SW1W 9HS (red, turquoise)

87 Marchmont Street, WC1N 1AL (orange, turquoise)

A Moving Example

Luigi Galvani's ideas were known to the Mary Shelley group. The scientist's nephew Giovanni Aldini played a leading role in promoting his ideas. George Forster was convicted of having wilfully drowned his wife and daughter in a stretch of canal at Paddington. The killer was executed in Newgate Prison on 18 January 1803. His corpse, while it was still warm, was taken to the nearby Royal College of Surgeons. There, before a gathered audience, Aldini applied an electric current to it for four hours. Its muscles were seen to spasm. This was done in order to demonstrate the role that electricity plays in the functioning of the body.

Location: 32 Old Bailey, EC4M 7HS. The site of Newgate Prison. (blue, red)

James Herbert

James Herbert's (1943-2013) debut novel was The Rats (1974). He was inspired to write it by a line in Dracula (1897) in which a lunatic declares that he has a thousand red-eyed rats looking at him from the lawns.

David Backhouse 2024