Tuesday, October 2, 2018

In Search of the Real Frankenstein

From The Spectator:
It’s 1816, a volcanic eruption has shrouded the world in darkness, making this the ‘Year Without a Summer’. Lord Byron, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Shelley’s 18-year-old lover, one Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, find themselves huddled for warmth in a shadowy villa in Switzerland. Their only entertainment? A competition to see who could think up the most bone-chilling, blood-curdling horror story. As the two famous poets and their female companion began dredging the darkest recesses of their minds, who would have thought that what emerged from the lips of the young Mary Godwin (soon to be Shelley) would become literature’s most iconic monster?

The legend of how Frankenstein came to be is almost as famous as the tale itself. But how much do we really know about what sparked off the freakish idea for the first science fiction novel in this teenage girl? Two hundred years exactly since its anonymous publication, we are beginning to learn the fact behind the fiction.

Flashback four years to 1814. Scribbled in the diary of the future Mary Shelley are the words: ‘Shelley and Clary out all the morning. Read French Revolution in the evening…Go to Garnerin’s. Lecture on Electricity; the gasses and the Phantasmagoria.’ It was at this lecture in London that one Somerset scientist, known as ‘the Thunder and Lightning Man’, laid out his theories on how to harness the power of storms to create electricity.

Amid the wild Quantock Hills the crashes and explosions emanating from an isolated manor house sparked off rumours of devils dancing on electricity wires and hell itself unleashed. In fact, the manor’s owner, Andrew Crosse, was channeling lightning strikes by capturing the electrical discharge inside jars in his ‘philosophy room’, to use for medical purposes. The sounds let off by the electricity discharging created blasts that were often mistaken for the sounds of man-made storms.

Crosse’s own letters report his amazement at the deafening noises and five-hour long ‘stream of fire’ let out by his electrical experiments which ‘must be witnessed to be conceived’. Could it be that the man-made thunder claps of the ‘Wizard of the Quantocks’, as locals nicknamed Crosse, inspired Mary Shelley’s eccentric scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who in another ‘stream of fire’ from ‘a most violent and terrible thunderstorm’ begins his search for the secret to creating human life? Not only her main character, but Mary Shelley and her poet husband too were obsessed with the power of electricity. Growing up Percy Shelley would ‘practise electricity’ on his family, administering them small shocks at the dinner table. While studying at Oxford University he even threatened to electrocute the son of his cleaner. (Read more.)

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