Q&A YOU ASK, WE ANSWER
What inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ?
SHORT ANSWER A wet summer holiday, a writing challenge and a nightmare all led Mary Shelley to cry out: “IT’S ALIVE!”
LONG ANSWER Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin spent the summer of 1816 on holiday near Lake Geneva, Switzerland, with her soon-to-be husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. The weather was dismal – ash from an Indonesian volcano affected the global climate that year – so they passed the time telling ghost stories.
One day during that ‘year without a summer’, their dinner host, Romantic poet Lord Byron, issued a challenge to his guests: they each had to come up with a horror story. Eighteen-year-old Mary, with little writing experience and in awe of her esteemed company, struggled to bring any creation to life. That was until one fateful night when she had a nightmare, fuelled by conversations concerning the scientific subject of galvanism, about a man using electricity to give life to dead body tissue.
Mary soon put together the terrifying tale of scientist Dr Victor Frankenstein and his creature made from dug-up corpses. Her gothic masterpiece was published, anonymously, in 1818 under the title Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. It actually wasn’t the only story to come out of Lord Byron’s contest, as another guest, Dr John Polidori, wrote The Vampyre – a seminal work that influenced Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Who were the Pit Brow Lasses?
Soot-covered men who risked their lives underground
