The Real Science Experiments That Inspired Frankenstein

With the Hal­loween sea­son mere months away, the time has come to start think­ing about what fright­en­ing reads to line up for our­selves this year. Some of us may reach for Mary Shel­ley’s Franken­stein; or, The Mod­ern Prometheus, a sto­ry we all think we know. But a look into its con­text reveals that what’s now regard­ed as a time­less clas­sic was, in its day, quite a top­i­cal nov­el. Intro­duc­ing the 1931 James Whale film adap­ta­tion, the reg­u­lar hor­ror-movie play­er Edward Van Sloan describes Franken­stein as deal­ing with “the two great mys­ter­ies of cre­ation: life and death” — which, when Shel­ley’s nov­el was pub­lished more than a cen­tu­ry ear­li­er, were yet more mys­te­ri­ous still.

“Wor­ried by the poten­tial inabil­i­ty to dis­tin­guish between the states of life and death, two doc­tors, William Hawes and Thomas Cogan, set up the Roy­al Humane Soci­ety in Lon­don in 1774,” writes Sharon Rus­ton at The Pub­lic Domain Review. At the time, it was actu­al­ly called the Soci­ety for the Recov­ery of Per­sons Appar­ent­ly Drowned, a name that would’ve dou­bled neat­ly as a mis­sion state­ment. Falling into the rivers and canals of Lon­don was, it seems, a com­mon occur­rence in those days, and few mem­bers of the pub­lic pos­sessed the swim­ming skills to save them­selves. Thus the Soci­ety’s mem­bers took it upon them­selves to devise meth­ods of reviv­ing those “per­sons appar­ent­ly drowned,” whether their plunges were acci­den­tal­ly or delib­er­ate­ly tak­en.

One such attempt­ed sui­cide, writes Rus­ton, “seems to have been Mary Shelley’s moth­er, the fem­i­nist, Mary Woll­stonecraft,” who lat­er com­plained about how, after leap­ing into the Thames, she was “inhu­man­ly brought back to life and mis­ery.” That inci­dent could well have done its part to inspire Franken­stein, though notions of reviv­ing the dead were very much in the air at the time, not least due to the atten­tion being paid to the prac­tice of “Gal­vanism,” which involved stim­u­lat­ing the mus­cles of dead ani­mals and human bod­ies to move­ment using the then-nov­el phe­nom­e­non of elec­tric­i­ty. In the Eng­land of that his­tor­i­cal moment, it was­n’t entire­ly far-fetched to believe that the dead real­ly could be brought back to life.

You can learn more about the sci­en­tif­ic devel­op­ments, social changes, and human anx­i­eties (includ­ing about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of being buried alive) that formed Franken­stein’s cul­tur­al back­ground from the Vox His­to­ry Club video above. In a way, it seems inevitable that some­one in the ear­ly nine­teenth cen­tu­ry would write about a sci­en­tist avant la let­tre who dares to cre­ate life from death. It just hap­pened to be the teenage Shel­ley, to whom the idea came while engaged in a com­pe­ti­tion with Lord Byron, the writer-physi­cian John Poli­dori, and her soon-to-be hus­band Per­cy Bysshe Shel­ley to see who could write the scari­est sto­ry. Two cen­turies lat­er, the sto­ry of Franken­stein may no longer scare us, but as told by Shel­ley, it still has a way of sound­ing strange­ly plau­si­ble.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Read­ing Mary Shelley’s Franken­stein on Its 200th Anniver­sary: An Ani­mat­ed Primer to the Great Mon­ster Sto­ry & Tech­nol­o­gy Cau­tion­ary Tale

Read a Huge Anno­tat­ed Online Edi­tion of Franken­stein: A Mod­ern Way to Cel­e­brate the 200th Anniver­sary of Mary Shelley’s Clas­sic Nov­el

Mary Shelley’s Hand­writ­ten Man­u­script of Franken­stein: This Is “Ground Zero of Sci­ence Fic­tion,” Says William Gib­son

The Very First Film Adap­ta­tion of Mary Shelley’s Franken­stein, a Thomas Edi­son Pro­duc­tion (1910)

The First Muse­um Ded­i­cat­ed to Mary Shel­ley & Her Lit­er­ary Cre­ation Franken­stein Opens in Bath, Eng­land

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.