Frankenstein
Frankenstein begins not with a monster but with a question whispered around a log fire. In the rainy summer of 1816, Mary Shelley sat at Lord Byron's Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva, in the Swiss Alps. The weather was too cold and dreary for the outdoor holiday the group had planned, so they stayed indoors until dawn. To pass the time, they read German ghost stories translated into French. Then Byron made a proposal that would echo for two centuries. He suggested that they each write a ghost story.
Mary Shelley, then 18, could not think of one. She recalled being asked each morning, "Have you thought of a story?" and every time being "forced to reply with a mortifying negative." The answer, when it came, arrived as a waking dream after midnight. From that dream grew Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, an 1818 Gothic novel that would spawn a complete genre of horror stories, films, and plays.
The story follows Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature from different body parts in an unorthodox experiment. But the novel hides as many mysteries as it tells. Why did a teenage girl reach for reanimation and ruin? Where did the name Frankenstein come from, and why is it so often pinned on the wrong character? And how did a book issued anonymously in just 500 copies become one of the best-known works of English literature?
During one evening in the middle of that summer, the discussions at Byron's villa turned to the nature of the principle of life. "Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated," Mary noted, "galvanism had given token of such things." Galvanism and occult ideas were favourite topics among her companions, particularly her lover and future husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley.
It was after midnight before the company retired, and Mary could not sleep. She became possessed by her imagination as she beheld the "grim terrors" of her "waking dream." She described it directly: "I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion."
The vision frightened her, and that fear was the point. "Frightful must it be," she wrote, "for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world."
The season itself was unnatural. The summer of 1816 is remembered as the "Year Without a Summer," a long, cold volcanic winter caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. In September 2011, astronomer Donald Olson inspected data about the motion of the moon and stars and concluded that her waking dream took place between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. on the 16th of June 1816.
The conclave produced more than one monster. Byron managed only a fragment based on vampire legends he had heard while travelling the Balkans. From that fragment, his physician John Polidori created The Vampyre in 1819, the progenitor of the romantic vampire genre.
Mary Shelley's mother, the writer Mary Wollstonecraft, died from infection eleven days after giving birth to her. Wollstonecraft was famous for the 1792 essay A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. That early loss shaped a childhood marked by absence and friction.
Mary grew close to her father, William Godwin, a famous author of the time known for his 1793 book Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. He prized her education, though it was not formal. She grew up surrounded by his friends, writers, and figures of political importance who gathered at the family home, and this inspired her authorship at an early age. When Godwin married his second wife, Mary Jane Clairmont, the new stepmother disliked the close bond between father and daughter, and the resulting friction caused Godwin to favour his other children.
At the age of sixteen, Mary met Percy Bysshe Shelley while he was visiting her father. Godwin disapproved of the relationship between his daughter and an older, married man, so they fled to France along with her stepsister, Claire Clairmont. On the 22nd of February 1815, Mary gave birth prematurely to her first child, Clara, who died two weeks later.
The themes of loss, guilt, and the consequences of defying nature in the novel grew from this life. The loss of her mother, the relationship with her father, and the death of her first child are thought to have inspired the monster and his separation from parental guidance. In a 1965 issue of The Journal of Religion and Health, a psychologist proposed that her guilt stemmed from not feeling good enough for Percy because of the loss of their child.
She began the first four chapters in the weeks following the suicide of her half-sister Fanny. When she started composing in 1816, she was probably nursing her second child, who was also dead by the time Frankenstein was published.
Humphry Davy wrote in his Elements of Chemical Philosophy that "science has... bestowed upon man powers which may be called creative; which have enabled him to change and modify the beings around him." In The Frankenstein of the French Revolution, author Julia Douthwaite posits that Shelley probably drew some ideas for Victor's character from that book.
Ideas about life and death discussed by Percy and Byron fascinated the scientists of their age. They drew on the theories of Erasmus Darwin and the experiments of Luigi Galvani, as well as the work of James Lind. Mary joined these conversations, and the ideas of Darwin, Galvani, and perhaps Lind are reflected in her novel.
Much of the actual writing happened in a lodging house in the centre of Bath, England, in 1816. According to The Guardian, Shelley came to Bath to hide, yet found deep wells of inspiration in the shadow of the city's gothic abbey, particularly among Bath's medical community. She was a contemporary of Dr Charles Wilkinson, a pioneer of medical electricity, and attended lectures at his laboratory around the corner from her lodgings while writing about Victor breaking taboos by using galvanism to shock life into a creature stitched together from dead body parts.
Two natural philosophers loom over the speculation about her sources. The Italian Giovanni Aldini made many public attempts at human reanimation through bio-electric galvanism in London. Johann Konrad Dippel was supposed to have developed chemical means to extend the human lifespan. Shelley was aware of both men, yet she makes no mention of them or their experiments in any of her published or released notes.
The group also weighed Enlightenment against Counter-Enlightenment. Mary believed the Enlightenment idea that society could progress if leaders used their powers responsibly, and also the Romantic idea that misused power could destroy society.
Boris Karloff's flat-headed monster, jolted to life by lightning, is not what Mary Shelley wrote. The cobbled-together image and the massive electrical jolt came largely from James Whale's popular 1931 film and other early motion pictures, not the book. The impact of that adaptation runs deep. In a 2025 publication of the novel, an introduction by Jeanette Winterson erroneously references a massive jolt of electricity used to imbue life in the creature.
In the original work, Victor discovers a previously unknown but elemental principle of life, an insight that lets him develop a method to imbue vitality into inanimate matter. The exact nature of the process is left ambiguous. After much hesitation, Victor spends two years painstakingly constructing the body one anatomical feature at a time, from raw materials supplied by "the dissecting room and the slaughter-house."
Frankenstein never gives his creation a name. The being is called "wretch," "monster," "creature," "demon," "devil," "fiend," and "it." In conversation, Victor addresses him as "vile insect," "abhorred monster," "fiend," "wretched devil," and "abhorred devil."
The creature reaches for older stories to understand himself. Having read Milton's Paradise Lost, he tells Victor, "I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel." That fallen angel is Lucifer, whose name means "light-bringer." Adam appears again in the epigraph of the 1818 edition, which asks, "Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould Me man?"
The nameless being eventually stole the name of his maker. In 1908, one author observed how "well-nigh universally the term 'Frankenstein' is misused, even by intelligent people, as describing some hideous monster." After Whale's film, the public at large began calling the Creature itself Frankenstein, a misnomer that continued through Bride of Frankenstein in 1935 and titles such as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.
Frankenstein, the German name, means "stone of the Franks," and it is attached to many places. There is Frankenstein Castle in Darmstadt, Hesse, another Frankenstein Castle in a village in the Palatinate, a castle in Bad Salzungen in Thuringia, and a municipality in Saxony. The town of Frankenstein in Silesia, now in Poland, was the site of a gravedigger scandal in 1606, suggested as a possible inspiration. The name is also borne by the aristocratic House of Franckenstein from Franconia.
Mary Shelley maintained that she derived the name from a dream-vision, but scholars have disputed and debated that. Radu Florescu argued that she and Percy visited Frankenstein Castle near Darmstadt in 1814, where Dippel had experimented with human bodies, and that she suppressed mention of the visit to maintain her claim of originality. A literary essay by A.J. Day supports that position and cites an alleged description of the castle in her "lost journals." According to Jörg Heléne, the claims of Day and Florescu cannot be verified.
The first name may come from John Milton, who frequently refers to God as "the victor" in Paradise Lost. Victor's creation of life is compared to God's, and the monster owes much to the character of Satan.
The subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, reaches further back. In Greek mythology, Prometheus was the Titan who created humans in the image of the gods, then took back fire from Zeus to give to humanity. For that, Zeus fixed him to a rock of Caucasus, where each day an eagle pecked out his liver, which regrew because of his immortality.
As a Pythagorean, Mary Shelley saw Prometheus not as a hero but as something of a devil, blaming him for seducing the human race to the vice of eating meat. The phrase "Modern Prometheus" itself came from Immanuel Kant, who described Benjamin Franklin as the "Prometheus of modern times" for his experiments with electricity.
Five hundred copies, in three volumes, was the entire first run. Shelley completed her writing in April or May 1817, and the novel was published on the 1st of January 1818 by the small London house Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones. It appeared anonymously, with a preface written for Mary by Percy and a dedication to her father, William Godwin. Her own name first appeared in print on a French translation published in Paris in 1821.
Contemporary critics split sharply. Walter Scott, writing in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, praised an "extraordinary tale" that disclosed "uncommon powers of poetic imagination." Writing anonymously in the Quarterly Review, John Wilson Croker conceded the author had powers of conception and language, yet called the book "a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity." The British Critic turned on the writer herself once it understood she was "a female," dismissing the novel without further comment.
The stage made her famous before the critics could agree. Richard Brinsley Peake's play Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein was performed thirty-seven times at the English Opera House in the West End during the 1823 season. Shelley attended a performance on the 29th of August 1823 and wrote, "lo & behold! I found myself famous!" That same year, the second English edition appeared on the 11th of August 1823 and credited Mary Shelley as author on its title page.
Then came revision. On the 31st of October 1831, the first "popular" edition appeared in one volume, heavily revised partly to make the story less radical, with a lengthy new introduction. This is the version most widely read today, though scholars such as Anne K. Mellor prefer the original, arguing it preserves the spirit of her vision. Her manuscripts for the 1818 edition now rest in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, acquired in 2004 as part of the Abinger Collection.
Brian Aldiss has argued for regarding Frankenstein as the first true science-fiction story, because the central character "makes a deliberate decision" and "turns to modern experiments in the laboratory" to achieve fantastic results. The novel is generally considered a landmark, one of the greatest Romantic and Gothic novels and one of the first science fiction novels.
Filmmakers returned to it again and again. The 1931 film, with Boris Karloff as the monster, is considered the most well-known portrayal. The Hammer Horror films shifted focus to Dr Frankenstein himself, played by Peter Cushing in six films beginning in 1957.
The story also lived on the page beyond the novel. In December 1945, the Gilberton Company issued a comic book version as No. 26 in its Classics Illustrated series, illustrated by Robert Hayward Webb and Ann Brewster. It went through nineteen printings between 1945 and 1971, and the historian Mike Benton praised it as "probably the most faithful adaptation of the original novel -- movies included." The Japanese horror artist Junji Ito published his own comics adaptation, which won an Eisner Award in 2019 for "Best Adaptation from Another Medium."
Modern admirers describe the book in personal terms. Guillermo del Toro calls it "the quintessential teenage book," marvelling that it is "an amazing book written by a teenage girl." The philosopher Patricia MacCormack says the Creature poses the most fundamental human questions: "It's the idea of asking your maker what your purpose is."
The honours kept coming. On the 5th of November 2019, BBC News included Frankenstein in its list of the 100 most influential novels. Jersey Post marked the 200th anniversary in 2018 with a series of 8 stamps, and in 2021 Royal Mail chose it as one of six classic British science fiction novels for a series of UK postage stamps.
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Common questions
Who wrote Frankenstein and when was it published?
Frankenstein was written by the English author Mary Shelley and first published anonymously in London on the 1st of January 1818. She was 20 years old when it appeared, and her name first appeared in print on a French translation published in Paris in 1821.
What is Frankenstein about?
Frankenstein tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature from different body parts in an unorthodox scientific experiment. The 1818 Gothic novel follows Victor's horror at his creation and the destruction that follows as the creature seeks recognition and revenge.
How did Mary Shelley come up with the idea for Frankenstein?
Mary Shelley conceived Frankenstein during the rainy summer of 1816 at Lord Byron's Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva, after Byron suggested that the group each write a ghost story. The idea came to her as a waking dream that astronomer Donald Olson later dated to between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. on the 16th of June 1816.
Why is the monster in Frankenstein wrongly called Frankenstein?
Frankenstein is the name of Victor Frankenstein, the scientist, while his creation is never given a name in the novel. After James Whale's 1931 film with Boris Karloff, the public at large began calling the Creature itself Frankenstein, and the misnomer continued through later films such as Bride of Frankenstein.
Where does the name Frankenstein come from?
The German name Frankenstein means "stone of the Franks" and is attached to several places in Germany, including Frankenstein Castle in Darmstadt and a village in the Palatinate. Mary Shelley said she derived the name from a dream-vision, though scholars such as Radu Florescu have argued she may have known of Frankenstein Castle, where the alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel had experimented with human bodies.
Why is Frankenstein considered the first science fiction novel?
Brian Aldiss argued that Frankenstein is the first true science-fiction story because Victor Frankenstein "makes a deliberate decision" and "turns to modern experiments in the laboratory" to achieve fantastic results. The novel is now generally considered one of the first science fiction novels as well as a landmark Romantic and Gothic work.
All sources
72 references cited across the entry
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- 2JournalVital matters: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Romantic scienceMaurice Hindle — 1990
- 4Frankenstein: or, The Modern PrometheusMary W. Shelley
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- 6NewsThe Strange and Twisted Life of "Frankenstein"Jill Lepore — 2018-02-05
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- 11JournalPhilosophical and Literary Sources of FrankensteinBurton Pollin — Spring 1965
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- 15JournalThe Science of Life and Death in Mary Shelley's FrankensteinSharon Ruston — 25 November 2015
- 17Did a Volcanic Eruption in Indonesia Really Lead to the Creation of Frankenstein?Alan Marshall — January 2020
- 18Frankenstein's hour of creation identified by astronomersTim Radford — 2011-09-25
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- 21NewsHouse of horror: Bath opens the world's first museum dedicated to Mary ShelleyLorna Parkes — 23 July 2021
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- 35Afera grabarzy z FrankensteinHistoria zapomniana — 24 January 2016
- 36Florescu (1996) p. 48–92Florescu — 1996
- 37BookFantasmagoriana (Tales of the Dead)A.J. Day — Fantasmagoriana Press — 2005
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- 41BookThe Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. The Text Carefully Revised by William Michael Rossetti · Volume 1Percy Shelley — Harvard University — 1885
- 42Original Poetry by Victor and CazireMark Sandy — The Literary Dictionary Company — 20 September 2002
- 43Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)Department of English, Dickinson College
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