"I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet."聽 With these words Victor Frankenstein began his account of the adventure that would terrify generations of readers.聽Although Mary Shelley's classic 1816 tale is usually thought of as a horror story, it is actually a thoughtful fantasy about the consequences of science gone astray.聽What prompted an eighteen-year-old girl to write such a dark, scary story about creating life?聽Works of fiction are often born out of some real life experience.聽So it is interesting to muse about what actual events may have triggered the concept of Frankenstein.
First, let's get one thing straight.聽Frankenstein was the creator, not the monster.聽And he was not a doctor.聽Neither was he a "mad scientist."聽Victor Frankenstein was a university student who from a young age had been obsessed with a search for the secrets of heaven and earth.聽He voraciously read the works of the great alchemists like Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus who tried to find the secret of everlasting youth.聽He became fascinated with the power of electricity when he saw a tree split by a lightening bolt.
The death of his mother prompted Victor to search even more vigorously for the secret of life.聽Finally, after numerous failed experiments, he managed to breathe life into the famous creature that he had assembled from body parts.聽Mary Shelley does not describe the details of the creation; there is no mention of bubbling flasks or electrical generators.聽All of that was added by the moviemakers.聽In fact, Mary's creature is not a monster!聽Quite unlike the Boris Karloff incarnation, he learns to think and converse intelligently.聽It is only when society shuns him because of his appearance that he turns violent.聽 Victor Frankenstein had unintentionally unleashed a scourge on society!
Was Mary Shelley herself worried about what unbridled science might unleash?聽Perhaps.聽Mary married Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had left his wife and children for her.聽One of their first outings together was to a public lecture in London about the medical uses of electricity and 鈥済alvanism.鈥澛燣uigi Galvani in Italy had discovered that touching a severed frog leg with metal instruments caused the leg to quiver!聽 He wrongly interpreted this phenomenon as "animal electricity."聽 Actually he had accidentally set up a battery with two dissimilar metals acting as terminals and the frog's fluid as electrolyte.聽The demonstration of galvanism had quite an impact on Mary.聽Apparently she even had a dream that a stillborn baby was brought back to life by electricity.聽Why did Percy drag Mary to a scientific lecture?聽Because he had become keenly interested in chemistry as a student at Eton thanks to his mentor, a Scottish natural Philosopher by the name of James Lind (1736-1812).聽Lind had obviously excited students with chemical experiments because one of Percy Shelley鈥檚 biographers recounts how his rooms at Oxford were cluttered with chemical equipment.聽But Lind also had developed a passionate interest in 鈥渁nimating鈥� dead limbs with electricity.聽 Indeed, Lind was the first British scientist to repeat Galvani鈥檚 experiments, possibly in the presence of Percy Shelley.聽
Certainly Lind did not think that electricity could bring the dead back to life but he did tinker with the idea of using electricity to treat illness.聽He even suggested that it might be tried to treat the madness of King George!聽 Christopher Goulding, a researcher in English literature at the University of Newcastle goes as far as to suggest that Dr. Lind may have served as the model for the character of Victor Frankenstein.聽He also draws some interesting parallels between the character of Waldman, the chemistry lecturer who so fascinates Frankenstein and Lind.聽In any case, it is very likely that one way or another, Percy Shelley鈥檚 encounter with Dr. Lind played a significant role in the creation of Frankenstein.聽
Mary and Percy Shelley left England, probably because of the scandal surrounding their marriage and took a boat tour down the Rhine River in Germany.聽Here they apparently stopped at a castle which had become a tourist attraction because of the exploits of a former inhabitant by the name of Johan Conrad Dipple.聽Dipple was a seventeenth century alchemist who pursued knowledge relentlessly.聽 Shades of Victor Frankenstein!聽Rumor even had it that he dug up graves and collected cadavers for macabre experiments.聽He had been passionate about finding out how the body worked.聽He even created "Dipple's Oil," which supposedly prolonged life.聽Dipple may have died from tasting his own concoctions since he is known to have met his demise foaming at the mouth and convulsing.聽The name of the castle?聽Castle Frankenstein!
The Shelleys also stopped at another tourist attraction on the Rhine, a museum featuring "automata."聽These were ingenious clockwork dolls created by master craftsmen. Some survive to this day and still amaze people with their life-like antics.聽So the stage was set.聽Mary had been impressed by galvanism.聽She had visited castle Frankenstein and learned about Dipple's efforts to create life.聽The automata she had seen looked practically alive.聽It is therefore little wonder that when she, her husband and two friends forced inside by the cold Swiss weather got into a game of writing horror stories, Mary produced the classic Frankenstein.聽She also left us with an important legacy about the need to think carefully about the consequences of science, whether that be assembling body parts or molecules!
