Who put the spark in Frankenstein’s monster?

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus was published 200 years ago in 1818, when she was just 21. It was the result of a challenge laid down in 1816 by Lord Byron, when Shelley and her lover – later her husband – Byron’s fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley were holidaying at Lake Geneva in Switzerland.

The party had hoped for good weather, but the eruption of a volcano in the East Indies in 1815, the greatest event of its kind in recorded history, had ushered in three years of bone-chilling cold that killed crops and cast a shadow across Europe. As they huddled for warmth around a fire one night, Byron suggested each of them should write a horror story.

For days Shelley suffered writer’s block until she came up with the idea of a scientist who reanimated a creature stitched together from body parts, only to be horrified by his success. Some believe Shelley was inspired by a trip to Germany, where she is thought to have learned the legend of Frankenstein Castle and one of its 17th-century inhabitants, an alchemist called Johann Conrad Dippel, who was rumoured to have exhumed bodies for experimentation.

But it now appears Shelley’s true source of inspiration for Victor Frankenstein’s monster was considerably closer to home. In a foreword to a new edition of the classic, to be published by Oxford University Press next month, Nick Groom, of Exeter University, sometimes referred to as the “Prof of Goth”, suggests it was her husband’s fascination with galvanism – chemically generated electricity – that sparked her imagination.

Percy Shelley, one of Britain’s most cherished Romantic poets and author of the celebrated sonnet Ozymandias, was fascinated by science, in particular the creation of electricity. “He was very excited by galvanic apparatus,” Groom explained. “His sister, Helen, would recall that he would, as she put it, ‘practise electricity upon us’. He used to make all the family sit around the dining room table holding hands, and he’d turn up with some brown paper, a bottle and a wire and they’d all get electrocuted.”

Source: theguardian