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A summary of Themes in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Learn exactly what happened in this chapter, scene, or section of Frankenstein and what it means. Perfect for acing essays, tests, and quizzes, as well as for writing lesson plans.

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In September 1715, John Erskine, Earl of Mar, raised the standard for a 'Jacobite' rising, intended to restore the exiled Stuart monarchy to the throne, and proclaimed James Francis Edward Stuart (James II's son) king of Scotland. The Jacobites were defeated by government forces at the battles of Sheriffmuir and Preston in November 1715. Three months later the rebellion had been quashed. The Jacobite leaders were impeached and some were executed.

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BBC - History : British History Timeline

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In September 1715, John Erskine, Earl of Mar, raised the standard for a 'Jacobite' rising, intended to restore the exiled Stuart monarchy to the throne, and proclaimed James Francis Edward Stuart (James II's son) king of Scotland. The Jacobites were defeated by government forces at the battles of Sheriffmuir and Preston in November 1715.

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Shmoop guide to Mary Shelley Writing Frankenstein. Smart, fresh history of Mary Shelley Writing Frankenstein by PhDs and Masters from Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley

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Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley, the author of the legendary Frankenstein, was no commonplace nineteen-year-old teenager. In a matter of way, she was a literary novice in her own respect, right from childhood. Being the daughter to the thinker, novelist and publisher William Godwin and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, she basked amongst literary elite right from her early days.

Whilst girls of her age attended to ball frocks and hair-do's she was more occupied with contemporary Gothic novels; Paradise Lost by Milton, Paradise Regained, Areopagetica, Lycidas and Comus. On the other end, Shelly digested the works of her poet-husband Pryce Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, and Coleridge and while writing down the notorious Frankenstein, she was going through Gulliver's Travels by Swift.

So, Frankenstein was more of a girl's wonder that owed to childhood feasts on dark and peculiar fantasies.

According to Gilbert and Gubar, "Frankenstein is a Romantic and Feminist review of the Paradise Lost by Milton." Maybe this feminism is what marks this classic as timeless.

How was Frankenstein Born: One Dark Stormy Night

Summer, 1816

Lord Byron's Villa

Lake Geneva, Switzerland

It started one stormy night at the residence of Lord Byron where a group of contemporary literati were assembled. Mary Shelly was also visiting, accompanied by her childhood sweetheart and poet Percy Shelley. During this stay, the weather outside played havoc and storms followed forcing the group to seek indoor activities. To pass the stormy days and nights, the literary assemblage took turns in reading each other, ghost stories from an ancient volume. It was one such night, that Lord Byron threw the group a challenge to write the scariest ghost story ever, and the same night Mary Shelly saw her monster's first silhouette in dream.

When I placed my head upon my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. . . . I saw__with shut eyes, but acute mental vision__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. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous Creator of the world.

~Mary Shelley: Introduction to the Third Edition of Frankenstein~

Why Did Marry Shelly Want to Write the Story of a Grotesque Creature?

Man, by nature borrowed the sprinklings of his Creator. Deep within the folds of human conscientious, there rests a need to control and rule. Ironically, the pursuit of power is always attributed to Man__the Martian creature yet there are times when Venus takes heed. Writing Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus (1818) is one such occasion.

Latent reasons behind Mary Shelley's account of Frankenstein included the death of her first child, Willy, whom she had thoughts about, restoring to life. Additionally, hers was an era of scientific exploration and biological experimentation. Galvanism was regarded as a way to call upon life in corpses through electrification, leading to mythical qualities. Also, there had been successive deaths in her family shaping her infant brain to see the traumatic side of life and escapism.

The dream, in the after math of Lord Byron's challenge coupled with Mary Shelley's contemporary and domestic situation lead her to write the story of Frankenstein' monster, a creature cursed by his own plight.

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Mary Shelley, the author of the legendary Frankenstein, was no commonplace nineteen-year-old teenager. In a matter of way, she was a literary novice in her own respect, right from childhood. Being the daughter to the thinker, novelist and publisher William Godwin and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, she basked amongst literary elite right from her early days.

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"A brilliant, original, and powerful book. . . . This is the most skillful integration of feminism and Marxist literary criticism that I know of." So writes critic Stephen Greenblatt about The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, Mary Poovey's study of the struggle of three prominent writers to accommodate the artist's genius to the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ideal of the modest, self-effacing "proper lady." Interpreting novels, letters, journals, and political tracts in the context of cultural strictures, Poovey makes an important contribution to English social and literary history and to feminist theory.

"The proper lady was a handy concept for a developing bourgeois patriarchy, since it deprived women of worldly power, relegating them to a sanctified domestic sphere that, in complex ways, nourished and sustained the harsh 'real' world of men. With care and subtle intelligence, Poovey examines this 'guardian and nemesis of the female self' through the ways it is implicated in the style and strategies of three very different writers."-Rachel M. Brownstein, The Nation

" The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer is a model of . . . creative discovery, providing a well-researched, illuminating history of women writers at the turn of the nineteenth century. [Poovey] creates sociologically and psychologically persuasive accounts of the writers: Wollstonecraft, who could never fully transcend the ideology of propriety she attacked; Shelley, who gradually assumed a mask of feminine propriety in her social and literary styles; and Austen, who was neither as critical of propriety as Wollstonecraft nor as accepting as Shelley ultimately became."-Deborah Kaplan,

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"A brilliant, original, and powerful book. . . . This is the most skillful integration of feminism and Marxist literary criticism that I know of." So writes critic Stephen Greenblatt about The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, Mary Poovey's study of the struggle of three prominent writers to accommodate the artist's genius to the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ideal of the modest, self-effacing "proper lady."

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This volume reflects changing critical perceptions of Shakespeare's works from Renaissance to modern times and celebrates the power of Shakespearean tragedy. The selection of critical reaction covers both the general concept of Shakespearean tragedy and its expression in the major plays, illustrating the main directions of critical approaches to Shakespearean tragedy and enabling the reader to develop an informed response to Shakespeare's dramatic works.

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"I have no doubt of seeing the animal today," Mary Wollstonecraft wrote hastily to her husband, William Godwin, on August 30, 1797, as she waited for the midwife who would help her deliver the couple's first child. The "animal" was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who would grow up to be Mary Shelley, wife of the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and author of Frankenstein, one of the most enduring and influential novels of the nineteenth century. But Wollstonecraft would not live to see her daughter's fame: She died of an infection days after giving birth.

The last notes that Wollstonecraft wrote to Godwin are included in the exhibition "Shelley's Ghost: The Afterlife of a Poet," which began last year at the Bodleian Library in Oxford and has now come to the New York Public Library. On display are numerous artifacts both personal and literary from the lives of the Shelleys, including manuscript pages from the notebook in which Mary wrote Frankenstein (with editing in the margins by her husband), which have never before been shown publicly in the United States. But it was Wollstonecraft's scribbled note, in which she referred to her baby as "the animal"- the same word that the scientist in Frankenstein would use to describe his own notorious creation-that gave me pause. Could the novel-commonly understood as a fable of masculine reproduction, in which a man creates life asexually-also be a story about pregnancy?

Frankenstein is one of the great creation myths of all time: a scientist, drunk on knowledge and possibility, discovers the secret of animating matter and energizes a monstrous creature, which proceeds to wreak havoc on his life and that of everyone he loves. Perhaps inevitably, the novel has engendered its own creation myth, one that is nearly as uncanny as the tale of the monster itself. As Mary Shelley tells the story in her introduction to an 1831 reprint edition of the novel, she began writing it during a trip to Geneva in the summer of 1816, when she was only 18. The weather was wet, and the group-which included Mary, Percy (who was still married to his first wife, Harriet), and Lord Byron-passed the time by reading an old volume of ghost stories. After Byron proposed that each of them should write his or her own ghost story, Mary dreamed one night of a "hideous phantasm of a man stretched out .... On the working of some powerful engine, [it shows] signs of life, and stir[s] with an uneasy, half vital motion." The story followed quickly: She started it in June 1816 and finished it by May of the following year.

Most critics have understood Frankenstein as a cautionary tale of the dangers inherent in intellectual hubris: the Tower of Babel reworked as science fiction. "We need look no further than the novel's subtitle- The Modern Prometheus-to discover Frankenstein's main theme: the aspiration of modern masculinist scientists to be technically creative divinities," Maurice Hindle writes in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition. During the trip to Geneva, Byron and Percy Shelley were obsessed with new developments in natural philosophy, including the experiments of Erasmus Darwin with "galvanism"-the use of electrical current to stimulate inanimate objects. Mary had been listening to their discussions with great interest. Her father, a distinguished philosopher in his own right, had introduced her as a child to some of the great minds of the time, and she read widely in English literature and philosophy, including Milton's Paradise Lost and Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding-both foundational texts for Frankenstein.

Even considering Mary Shelley's extraordinary education, though, there is something that does not quite fit together in this origin theory. As Miranda Seymour, author of a recent biography, has written, Shelley's conception of an "ambitious young scientist who ... became the first creator of a living human being without divine assistance [was] a shocking idea in her day and an extraordinary one for a young woman to choose for her first subject." Mary admitted as much herself. "How [did] I, then a young girl, [come] to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?" she wondered in 1831, in an introduction to a reprint edition of the now-seminal novel.

But Mary Shelley at 18 was far more experienced than the ordinary young girl. She had met her future husband in May 1814, when she was 16 and he, a few years older, was a pupil of Godwin's; the two ran off together that summer, to the dismay of Mary's father and Shelley's wife. The following February, eight months later, she gave birth prematurely to a girl, who died after a few days. Soon Mary was pregnant again, and in January 1816 her son William was born. She and Shelley were married in December 1816, and she gave birth to their daughter Clara the following September.

In other words, not only was Mary Shelley pregnant during much of the period that she was writing Frankenstein, but she had already suffered the birth and death of an infant. Unsurprisingly, she was tormented by the loss: A journal entry in 1815 reads, "Dream that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lives." The echoes of Frankenstein -in which the scientist, who hopes to "infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet," at last sees it open its eyes and breathe-are unmistakable. And the birth of the "creature," as he calls it at first, occurs only after "days and nights of incredible labor and fatigue"; later he refers again to the "painful labor."

The monster is born fully formed, but his intellectual development follows the ordinary process of a human infant. While hiding out by a cabin, he learns language simply by watching and listening to the inhabitants, just as a child learns to speak. He even experiences the infant's characteristic moment of recognizing its own reflection: "How was I terrified when I viewed myself in a transparent pool!" And he feels his creator's rejection as keenly as he would the rejection of a parent. "Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?" he asks the scientist. The monster has a face that only a mother could love-but he has no mother.

The disasters that follow upon the "birth" of the monster are also of a piece with Mary's own experience. Childbirth in the early nineteenth century was perhaps just as dangerous as experimenting with electricity, as Mary well knew, having lost her own mother. (The infection from which Wollstonecraft died was caused by a piece of the placenta that remained inside her.) Mary would nearly die herself a few years later after suffering a miscarriage. And, in an era when children often died young, it is not coincidental that the monster's first victims are children: first a young boy called William, the same name as Mary's son; then a teenage girl. (Uncannily, William Shelley lived to be only three; daughter Clara died at only a year old.)

"Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject, and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it," Mary Shelley wrote in her 1831 introduction to Frankenstein. By the time this edition appeared, she had survived six pregnancies and the deaths of four children; writing must have seemed far more reliable than child-rearing as a way to mold and fashion ideas. If there could be any further doubt about the connection between her maternity and her creativity, it is dispelled by the end of the essay. "And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper," she concludes. "I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days."

Ruth Franklin is a senior editor at The New Republic. Follow her on Twitter @ruth_franklin.

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Books and Arts, Geneva, New York, The Read, Oxford, United States, Byron Shelley, Harriet, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Mary Shelley, Maurice Hindle, Percy Shelley, Ruth Franklin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Godwin, Franklin

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Was 'Frankenstein' Really About Childbirth?

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"I have no doubt of seeing the animal today," Mary Wollstonecraft wrote hastily to her husband, William Godwin, on August 30, 1797, as she waited for the midwife who would help her deliver the couple's first child.

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Q. What is the difference between primary and secondary sources? - Answers

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How do I cite information found within the text that is already cited by the author of the book I was reading?

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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On a quiet, cold night in June of 1816, a group of friends were gathered around a fire in a villa located in Lake Geneva, Switzerland. The host of the gathering was Lord Byron, the devil-may-care poet and aristocrat; his guests included his friend and physician John Polidari, his poet pal Percy Shelley, and Percy's new girlfriend, a clever 18 year-old named Mary Godwin. Mary was accompanied by her stepsister Jane, who, as it turned out, already had intimate familiarity with the charming rogue who was their host.

Despite a surplus of interesting personalities, this Romantic-era party of five were not having a very lively summer. The year 1816 has been called the "year without a summer" since a volcanic explosion in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) was so violent that ash in the air created a year-long winter for much of the world. New York in May had sub-zero temperatures, and the situation in Switzerland was not much more congenial. At its best, the weather was foggy and chill; at worst, it was freezing and rainy. The "summer that never was" dragged on the spirits of the friends and limited what they could do outdoors.

One of the ways the company passed the time was to stay up late talking, drinking, and reading ghost stories aloud. Out of sheer boredom, they decided to start a competition. Shelley, a big fan of the fantastic and occult, proposed that each member of the party write a horror story along the lines of the German tales they had been reading. The assembled group would read the stories aloud and then judge a winner. Being a creative and imaginative bunch, the others agreed it was a great idea and set to work.

Watch a mini bio of Mary Shelley, female fright writer:

That night, or during a night soon after, Mary Godwin had a dream. The dream was a morbid one about the creation of a new man by a scientist with the hubris to assume the role of god. History is quiet on whether or not Mary Godwin (soon to become Mrs. Shelley) won the competition at the villa with the tale that "haunted her midnight pillow," but her story became more than a fireside bit of entertainment. Properly developed, it became a successful novel in 1818, one of the firsts in a new genre of fiction that would eventually be branded "science fiction." In time, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein would make a cultural impact that still reverberates even now, almost two hundred years later.

In keeping with the latest cinematic adaptation of Frankenstein, which opens in theaters this Friday, we examine the metaphysical, scientific, and literary inspirations behind the creation of Mary Shelley's world-famous monster.
What's in a Dream?
Making definitive statements about what dreams do and how they work is all but impossible, but it is generally accepted that what we experience and encounter in our waking lives has a tendency to reappear in our sleep, usually in a different form. When Mary Shelley was dreaming her dream about Frankenstein, her mind was synthesizing a diverse mixture of information, speculation, and fancy. Undoubtedly, the talks that she and her friends were having at Lord Byron's villa had a lot to do with the form her dream took.
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One of the topics of the day that the friends were talking about was the theory of galvanism. Named for the scientist Luigi Galvani, galvanism postulated that the human body contained a type of electricity that traveled from the brain to stimulate muscles in the rest of the body. During experiments conducted 30 years previous, Galvani discovered that a dead frog's leg muscles were stimulated by electric current, and he drew the conclusion that animals created their own kind of electricity. Talk of galvanism had an obvious impact on Mary Shelley's creation: Dr. Frankenstein's "creature" is animated by a "spark" of electricity.

So much for the spark that gave Frankenstein's "creature" life. But where did the gruesome idea of the the creature's assembled parts come from?

Mary and her fellow writers were children of the so-called Age of Enlightenment, a movement that focused on reason and the scientific method rather than faith or tradition. A by-product of this movement was a rise in the number of anatomy schools, in which doctors of all stripes learned the secrets of the human body through dissection of cadavers. A doctor like Mary's Dr. Frankenstein would be very familiar with the methods of obtaining cadavers in a time when demand exceeded supply. The most common method involved collecting criminals after executions. When there weren't enough executions, even respectable anatomists would resort to paying grave robbers to unearth usable material. Aware of this trend, Mary Shelley would only need to make a small leap to imagine Frankenstein "dabbling among the unhallowed damps of the grave" to build his creature.
The Prometheus Myth
Modern editions of Frankenstein tend to drop the book's second title, or sub-title, when presenting the novel to readers. The full title of the book is Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. In Greek myth, Prometheus

was the god who molded the human race from clay, taught it how to live, and gave it fire, much to the displeasure of the gods. His punishment for doing so was to be bound to a rock for eternity, his liver eaten out by eagles over and over.

As poetry scholars, and as poets themselves, the group at Lord Byron's would have read the myth of Prometheus in its many different forms, from the earliest version set down by the Greek epic poet Hesiod through Roman poet Ovid's version in The Metamorphoses. Greek playwright Aeschylus wrote a cycle of plays based on the myth, and the one that survived, Prometheus Bound, was a great favorite of Byron's. The myth was so influential in the circle that Mary Shelley's husband Percy composed a sequel to the Aeschylus play called Prometheus Unbound.

Mary herself was clearly inspired by the myth. Dr. Frankenstein is "the modern Prometheus," a man who has created a new man out of the "clay" of robbed graves and given it a "spark." What he doesn't anticipate, much like Prometheus himself, is that his creation will be imperfect and ill-equipped for handling the new life bestowed upon it. Instead, the creature creates destruction in its wake, eventually destroying its creator.
The Shadow of Paradise Lost
The epigraph on Frankenstein's title page is a quote from the English poet Milton:
Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay To mould me man? Did I solicit thee From darkness to promote me?
It comes from Milton's blank-verse epic Paradise Lost, which tells the story of Satan's fall from heaven and the fall of man in the Garden of Eden. It's difficult to overstate the influence of Milton's poem on the writers that followed him, and Frankenstein owes a great debt to Paradise Lost. Mary Shelley makes this debt obvious when she shows her creature discovering the book and learning from it, as if it were a true tale. The creature identifies not only with Adam, whose speech bewailing his fallen state serves as the novel's epigraph, but also with Lucifer, the fallen angel, abandoned by God:

Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence; but his state was far different from mine in every other respect. He had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and prosperous, guarded by the especial care of his Creator; he was allowed to converse with, and acquire knowledge from, beings of a superior nature: but I was wretched, helpless, and alone. Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition.
In this passage and in passages like it, Mary Shelley makes explicit how her reading of this classic inspired her own lost creature of clay, as well as the "Creator" who formed and abandoned it. Other literature would also play a part in influencing the course of Frankenstein, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Coleridge was a friend of her father's), but Paradise Lost supplies a large share of the novel's conceptual heft.
An Ever-Burning Fire
Mary Shelley worked hard to transform a macabre dream borne of a night's chatter around a fireplace into a compelling narrative. She worked on it for almost two years, her husband encouraging her and helping her to edit the manuscript. Once published, the novel was a hit and started a fad for stories about other monstrous creations and scientific aberrations. Critically, the work was not universally praised, some referring to it as "feeble," "absurd," and "disgusting." Typical of its era, much of the criticism had more to do with the fact that the author was a woman than with the quality of the story. Time has been kind to the book, however, and it has come to be viewed as a forerunner of the genre of science fiction. Its unique combination of scientific theory and Gothic horror has inspired many, and innumerable adaptations have been made of its story through the years, including many plays and films.

Incidentally, Frankenstein was not the only tale with staying power created because of that night's entertainment in Switzerland. Byron started a story based on pagan Slavic legends that John Polidari, his comrade around the fire, turned into The Vampyre, published three years later. This would be the beginning of an equally long-lasting interest in vampire stories, a fascination that also continues to this day. How different our cultural lives might be today if the summer of 1816 had been sunny and bright!

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Her 'Midnight Pillow': Mary Shelley and the Creation of Frankenstein

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On a quiet, cold night in June of 1816, a group of friends were gathered around a fire in a villa located in Lake Geneva, Switzerland. The host of the gathering was Lord Byron, the devil-may-care poet and aristocrat; his guests included his friend and physician John Polidari, his poet pal Percy Shelley, and Percy's new girlfriend, a clever 18 year-old named Mary Godwin.

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March 20, 1800: Volta describes the Electric Battery

In the late 18 th century, scientists were fascinated with electricity. Ben Franklin had conducted his famous kite experiment, drawing electricity from lightning in 1752. Leyden jars, invented in 1746, could store charge and produce a spark of electricity. Doctors were treating patients with electric shocks for all sorts of ills. But further research on electromagnetism and any practical use of electricity would require a source of continuous current, which was not available until 1800, when Alessandro Volta invented the first electric pile, the forerunner of the modern battery.

Alessandro Volta was born in Como, Italy in 1745, to a wealthy noble family. He attended the Como Jesuit school and a local seminary. His teachers tried to persuade him to enter the priesthood, while his family wanted him to study law. But Volta, even at age 14, knew his real interest was physics. Like many scientists of the time, he was especially fascinated by electricity.

Volta dropped his formal studies, and did not attend university. Nonetheless, by age 18 he was corresponding directly with accomplished scientists, and conducting experiments in the laboratory of a family friend. In 1769 he wrote a treatise "On the forces of attraction of electric fire," in which he put forward a theory of electric phenomena.

In 1774 Volta accepted a post as an instructor at the Como grammar school, and continued his experiments on electricity. In 1775 he devised a "perpetual electrophorus" that could transfer charge to other objects, and in the next few years he noticed the bubbling of methane in swamps and was able to isolate the gas. Volta was made a professor of physics at the University of Pavia in 1778.

Volta's early work had already made him a well-known scientist, but his greatest contribution to science was the voltaic pile, which he invented as part of a scientific dispute with Luigi Galvani.

In 1780, Galvani, an Italian physician and anatomist, was experimenting with dissected frogs' legs and their attached spinal cords, mounted on iron or brass hooks. In most of his experiments, the frog leg could be made to twitch when touched with a probe made of another metal. The frog legs would also jump when hanging on a metal fence in a lightning storm. These observations convinced Galvani that he had found a new form of electricity, which was being generated by the frogs' muscles. He called the phenomenon "animal electricity."

Volta, though initially galvanized by this work, argued that the frogs' muscles were simply reacting to the electricity, not producing it. He set out to prove Galvani wrong, and sparked a controversy that divided the Italian scientific community.

Volta realized that the crucial feature of Galvani's experiments was the two dissimilar metals-the iron or brass hook and the probe of some other metal. The metals were generating the current, not the frog parts. Instruments available at the time could not detect weak currents, so Volta, always a dedicated experimentalist, often tested various combinations of metals by placing them on his tongue. The saliva in his mouth, like the frogs' tissue, conducted electricity, resulting in an unpleasant bitter sensation.

To show conclusively that the generation of an electric current did not require any animal parts, Volta put together a rather messy stack of alternating zinc and silver discs, separated by brine-soaked cloth. He built the pile, which consisted of as many as thirty disks, in imitation of the electric organ of the torpedo fish.

When a wire was connected to both ends of the pile, a steady current flowed. Volta found that different types of metal could change the amount of current produced, and that he could increase the current by adding disks to the stack.

In a letter dated March 20, 1800, addressed to Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society of London, Volta first reported the electric pile.

Volta soon traveled to Paris and demonstrated his invention, which he initially described as an "artificial electric organ," emphasizing that animal tissue was not needed to produce the current.

The battery was a huge success. Not only did it swing the scientific community to his side in the debate with Galvani, it was immediately recognized as a useful device. In 1800 William Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle used the current generated by a battery to decompose water into hydrogen and oxygen. Sir Humphry Davy also studied the same chemical effect. In the 1830s Michael Faraday used a battery in his groundbreaking studies of electromagnetism. Other inventors made improvements on Volta's original design, and soon it was powering telegraphs and doorbells.

Napoleon was impressed by the voltaic pile as well, and recommended many honors for Volta, including making him a count in 1810.

The invention of the battery brought him great renown, but Volta seems to have preferred a quiet life, and soon gave up most of his research and teaching. He spent his last years living in a country house, where he died on March 5, 1827, at age 82. Since his death, Volta's portrait has appeared on currency and stamps, and his name is immortalized in the unit of electric potential, the volt.

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In the late 18 th century, scientists were fascinated with electricity. Ben Franklin had conducted his famous kite experiment, drawing electricity from lightning in 1752. Leyden jars, invented in 1746, could store charge and produce a spark of electricity. Doctors were treating patients with electric shocks for all sorts of ills.

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Even the earliest recorded tales have elements of horror, fear, and despair, and the archetypes of horror have likely lasted much longer. The vampire archetype, for example, can be traced all the way back to the ancient civilization of Sumer; the vampire-like being Emikku would inhabit the bodies of people who had died violently or who were buried improperly.

Inquisition Spurs Interest in the Supernatural

But the roots of today's horror literature can be found first in the Inquisition. In 1235, the Vatican issued an order to reestablish the orthodoxy of the faith. Almost immediately, charges of heresy were inextricably tangled with allegations of witchcraft. The resulting obsession with witchcraft would endure until the seventeenth century.

Bartolomeo's depiction of Dante's Inferno (ca 1435)

Then in 1307, Dante published the first volume of his Divine Comedy, Inferno. The vision of Satan that Dante presented would prove heavily influential, though today it's been eclipsed by the one presented by John Milton in Paradise Lost (1667).For the next century, works of horror would still be largely tied to religion. In 1486, Inquisitors Henry Kramer and Jakob Sprenger published Malleus Maleficarum ( The Hammer of Witches). The book, which codified a belief in witchcraft, was reprinted 14 times throughout Europe by 1520. It certainly contributed to the witch craze that gripped the next two centuries.

By the 1580's, a new kind of horror had come to the London stage. The series of gruesome plays began with Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (1585) and included Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (1594), Hamlet (1600), and Macbeth (1605). Following the performance of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi (1613), death would not appear again on the English stage until Victor Hugo's Hernani was staged in 1730.

The Gothic Novel Emerges

Skip forward to 1714, when Thomas Parnell published A Night-Piece on Death. This was the first work of the so-called Graveyard Poets. Sometimes also called the Churchyard Poets, the group was made up of pre-Romantic poets known for their preoccupation with mortality and death. Oliver Goldsmith, William Cowper, James MacPherson, Robert Blair, and Thomas Chatterton were among the Graveyard Poets. Though most critics dismissed their work, their efforts did contribute to the evolution of the Gothic novel.

Villagers of Medvegja expected Paole and his supposed victims to be skeletons. Their lack of decomposition prompted the villagers to run stakes through their hearts and burn the bodies.

Sixteen years later, in 1731, the Austrian goverment ordered an investigation into a mass hysteria that gripped the village of Medvegja. Local citizen Arnold Paole had died in 1726 after falling off a hay wagon. Prior to his death, Paole had intimated that he'd been bitten by a vampire when he lived near Gossawa, in Turkish Serbia. To reverse the curse, Paole said he'd smeared himself with mud from the vampire's grave and with the vampire's blood. About a month after Paole's death, villagers said that the deceased man had risen from his grave and killed four people. Believing Paole to be a vampire, they'd disinterred his body forty days after his death. It was relatively undecayed, lending further "credibility" to their theory. They drove a stake through the heart of Paole's corpse and burned it. His four supposed victims' bodies were treated the same way. Despite these precautions, ten more people died of mysterious circumstances in 1731, and the village blamed Paole. (Read more about this fascinating case from the Wellcome Library.)

Johannes Fluckinger made the report, corroborating the villagers' claims. The story quickly gained attention throughout Europe. The tale made its way into both international journals and the imaginations of the fashionable set. Even scientists and philosophers were fascinated. From this unlikely source sprung our modern obsession with vampires.

In 1765, Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto, considered the first Gothic novel. The book would have incredible impact on the emerging genre of horror. The next influential novel in the genre would be Anne Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, a book that left an indelible mark Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, and countless other authors. Legendary authors like Matthew Lewis and Charles Brickden Brown would also contribute to the gothic novel as a genre.

An illustration of the characters of Castle of Otranto

Though these authors worked within the same genre, they didn't always appreciate each other's work. Inspired by Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis published The Monk anonymously in 1705 (because at that time he was a member of Parliament). But Radcliffe was so shocked at the luridness of Lewis' novel, she wrote The Italian (1797) in response.

The Gothic novel would take another dramatic turn in June, 1816. for three days, Lord r, Percy Shelley, Mary Wollenstonecraft Shelley, and Dr. John Polidori shared a villa at Lake Geneva. Likely under the influence of laudanum, they decided to have a ghost story-writing contest. The result: Mary Shelley originated the genre of science fiction with Frankenstein (1818), while Dr. Polidori established the vampire sub-genre with the publication of The Vampyr in the New Monthly Magazine (1819). Dr. Polidori's work was originally attributed to Lord Byron, and the main character is indeed a caricature of him.

Poe's "MS in a Bottle" first appeared in the Baltimore Saturday Visitor on Oct 19, 1833.

Meanwhille horror again flourished on the British stage from 1790 to 1825. Three theaters offered spectators a host of horrific options: Fitz Ball's The Devil's Elixir; Matthew Lewis' The Castle Spectre; and James Planche's The Vampire (1819) were just a few popular productions. The last actually led to the development of a new stage apparatus called the "vampire trap." These productions were both bloody and expensive, so they ceased as soon as "the devil was no longer in fashion."

Edgar Allan Poe would bring the Gothic tradition to America; his first story, "MS Found in a Bottle," appeared in the Baltimore Saturday Visitor in 1833. He went on to produce some of the world's most outstanding macabre tales, and has also been called the father of the detective novel.

Horror Even for Children

Over the next decade, horror would make its way into virtually all art forms. In 1819, Francesco Goya painted a series of eighteen frescoes, known as the Black Paintings, in response to the French invasion of Spain. And the following year Hector Berlioz made waves with Symphonie Fantastique. The symphony shocked its audiences with its shocking sounds and grotesque imagery; Berlioz had named the movements "March to the Scaffold" and "Dream of a Witch's Sabbath."

An illustration of Hans Christian Andersen's "Little Mermaid"

It's worth noting that even in this age of reason and scientific advancement, life was still often violent and short. People of all ages were often intimately acquainted with the realities of mortality. This fact extended to children. Modern readers are scandalized by the gruesomeness of Jakob and Willhelm Grimm's Kinder und Hausmarchen (1832) and the grisly details in Hans Christian Andersen's Tales Told for Children (1835). Today all these stories have been sanitized, but gory details and lessons learned through violence were not at all unheard of at the time.

And although they certainly don't qualify as horror in their own right, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1872) would influence horror writers over a century later, in the 1980's. Lewis Carroll's poem "The Jabberwocky" weaves the ridiculous with the horrifying, and twentieth-century authors would play with that juxtaposition, and with imaginary worlds and parallel universes such as Alice inhabited.

The Industrial Revolution and Penny Dreadfuls

The Industrial Revolution spelled major changes for horror literature in the 1840's. Literacy rates had improved. Cities were more crowded than ever. And people wanted a distraction from the less than idyllic life of industrialized cities. Horror during this time became more visceral and gory. The Penny Blood (or Penny Dreadful) emerged as a cheap form of entertainment for mass audiences. The stage equivalent was the Penny Gaff. Edward Lloyd made quite a fortune for himself off Penny Bloods. He'd already dipped into horror with Thomas Prest's The Calendar of Horrors in the 1830's, and he simply adapted that to a more recognizable form.

It was Prest who brought us Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber (originally The String of Pearls,1847). And James Malcolm Rymer was behind Varney the Vampire, or The Feast of Blood (1845), which had no little influence on the vampire genre (including Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1897). George Reynold's Wagner the Werewolf was published in 1846. At the time, people saw exposure to Penny Dreadfuls as a sure-fire path to juvenile delinquency. Parents banned the cheap books and frequently burned them if they were found in a child's possession. That unforgiving destruction gives Penny Dreadful collectors an interesting, though not insurmountable challenge, because it made these books all the more rare.

Gothic Begins to Give Way

Robert Browning published The Ring and the Book in 1868 and 1869, and it remains the longest narrative poem in the English language. The poem was also the first notable work of horror based on a contemporary criminal; Browning had based the poem on an old court record he had found in 1860, detailing a man's murder of his wife. A few years later, in 1872, Sheridan Le Fanu pubished "Camilla" in Through a Glass Darkly. In this piece and others Le Fanu began to dismantle Gothic artifices, bringing elements of horror and the supernatural into everyday life. The traditional trappings of Gothic horror had begun to fall away.

As Victorian ideals replaced Romantic ones, authors also turned their awareness back to individual morality. The crowded cities had grown more impersonal, more violent, and suddenly one could no longer count on the goodness of others. It was an anxious time, a time when man's propensity for evil could not be ignore, and thus ripe for a work like Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885). Like The Ring and the Book, Jekyll and Hyde was based on the a real story, a criminal whom Stevenson's family had actually once done business with. The novella was an instant success.

Meanwhile, only three years later, Jack the Ripper would wage his bloody campaign in London, giving us yet another archetype of horror. The earliest notable example of a Ripper-based story did not come, however, until 1913 with Belloc Lowndes' The Lodger.

Across the channel in France, the movement first known as L'Esprit Decadent and later called Symbolisme had gained a firm foothold among authors like Charles Baudelaire, Joris Karl Huysmans, and Guy de Maupassant. They produced some of the finest European works of the macabre. Poet Paul Verlaine did what no Gothic author had attempted to do--he gave horror a definition within the context of his movement, saying that "it is made of a mixture of the carnal spirit and the sad flesh, of all the violent splendours of the declining empire."

The French stage of the 1890's and 1900's saw the return of overt gore. The Grand Guignol, a term that once referred to puppets, came to denote short plays full of violence, murder, rape, suicide, and ghostly apparitions. London would eventually host its own less lurid adaptations of these plays, most notably from 1920 to 1922.

Posters for the Grand Guignol Theatre

Transition to Modern Horror

Ambrose Bierce published Can Such Things Be? in 1893. The collection of ghost stories followed his gritty war stories, bringing ghosts into modernity. HG Wells would go a step further in 1898; War of the Worlds, usually classified as blend of science fiction and horror, took horror into the future--presenting a whole new source of fear and anxiety for modern readers.

The turn of the century also saw the first experiments with horror film, which tended toward the gruesome and fantastic. The first true horror movie was William N Selig's sixteen-minute adaptation of Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde. The first movie adaptation would appear later, in 1910. Directed by J. Searle Dawley, the film's production required the assistance of none other than Thomas Edison!

By this time, the short story had definitively replaced the novel as the , containing his most highly regarded short story, "The Willow." Blackwood was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult society created by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers in 1888. The organization was home to many a prominent writer, from the infamous Aleister Crowley to modus operandi for most horror writers. In 1907, Algernon Blackwood published The Listener William Butler Yeats, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, and Sax Rhomer (who has faded into obscurity now but was wildly popular with his contemporaries). Members of the Order were responsible for the majority of weird and horror fiction produced in the UK at the time. Their work also marked the end of an era for horror; soon after, the genre's popularity would fade, not to reemerge in Britain until James Herbert and Clive Barker began publishing horror in the 1970's and 1980's.

In America, on the other hand, horror was flourishing. In 1923, the first issue of Weird Tales appeared. The magazine never turned a profit in its 32 years, but it did feature a number of still-famous authors like HP Lovecraft and Ray Bradbury. Four years later, Lovecraft published The Call of Cthulhu, earning him critical acclaim and recognition as one of the preeminent horror writers of the era.

Modern History's Impact on Horror

The Great Depression only enhanced Americans' interest in supernatural and horrifying. A number of horror-themed radio shows sprung up, including "The Shadow" (1930) and "The Spider" (1933). Both spawned successful spinoffs in the form of novellas and comic books. Yet the 1930's also marked the last decade of the pulps. Publisher Henry Steeger visited the French Grand Guignol theater for inspiration and returned to revive the Dime Mystery Novels series. He added the Terror Tales and Horror Stories series over the next two years. All three pulps survived until 1941.

The very real horrors of World War II overshadowed fictional ones. Though Bradbury and a few other significant authors continued publishing horror stories and science fiction, it wasn't until the 1950's that horror again hit a stride. Richard Matheson's 1954 I Am Legend was the first modern vampire novel, and Shirley Jackson's 1959 The House on Haunted Hill remains one of the most critically acclaimed genre novels of the past sixty years.

Also in 1957 was another seminal event in the modern history of the horror genre itself. Ed Gein, a Wisconsin farmer, was arrested for the murder of Bernice Worden. When authorities searched Gein's home, they discovered the remains of at least fifteen different women--in small pieces. Gein admitted to exhuming bodies and committing acts of cannibalism. The story shocked--and fascinated--the nation. ( Find sordid details here.) Much earlier Fritz Lang's 1931 movie, M, marked the first serious film about a serial killer and was based on the real-life serial killer Peter Kürten, the "Vampire of Dusseldorf." But the serial killer hadn't found its way into fiction yet. The Gein story would inspire Robert Bloch's Psycho (1959) and pave the way for works like Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter series. The serial killer has since become an indispensible archetype for the genre.

The Cold War had ushered in a new age of paranoia and fear of invasion. These fears were realized in works like Ira Levin's novel Rosemary's Baby (1967). This was the first prominent work of speculative fiction. It also marked a shift back towards the novel as the preferred form for horror writers. The 1970's saw a deluge of horror novels, starting with William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist (1971) and perhaps epitomized by Stephen King's Carrie (1974). King fairly burst into not only the American horror scene, but the larger world of literature. Peter Benchley published Jaws in 1975, which was a true coming of age for the modern monster tale. And Anne Rice published Interview with the Vampire in 1976, bringing new life and direction to vampire fiction.

New technology brought new possibilities for horror film makers of the 1980's. Soon the emphasis had shifted to gore for gore's sake, and the film genre fell out of favor with mainstream audiences. But the horror novel was enjoying an excellent reputation for quality writing, despite the growth in formulaic shocker stories. In 1981, Thomas Harris published Red Dragon, the first novel in his Hannibal Lecter series. The novel remains one of the most commercially successful portraits of a serial killer, and it heralded the start of the serial-killer craze of the ensuing decades. London playwright Clive Barker's short story collection The Book of Blood (1984) marked a new age of horror in the UK and Europe. He remained an influential figure, pushing the boundaries of the genre and fueling discussion over how the genre should be defined.

In recent years, the archetypes of vampires, werewolves, and zombies have come to dominate the horror genre. The 1990's was a time of compromise and self-consciousness for the genre. RL Stine's Goosebumps series was the publishing phenomenon of the decade, in some ways setting the stage for JK Rowling's Harry Potter series; Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials saga; and even Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series. Though horror has come a long way from its Gothic roots, there's no doubt that the genre will continue to flourish and evolve.

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Even the earliest recorded tales have elements of horror, fear, and despair, and the archetypes of horror have likely lasted much longer. The vampire archetype, for example, can be traced all the way back to the ancient civilization of Sumer; the vampire-like being Emikku would inhabit the bodies of people who had died violently or who were buried improperly.

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Mary Shelley Biography - life, children, name, story, death, wife, mother, young, son

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Mary's home life improved little when four years later her father married his next-door neighbor, Mary Jane Clairmont, who already had two children of her own. The new Mrs. Godwin favored her own children over the daughters of the celebrated Wollstonecraft, and Mary was often alone and unhappy.

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19th Century Science and The Woman Question by TP Sullivan

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A paper exploring scientific and medical views of women in the 19th Century. Good list of references.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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A global cinema audience will this week watch Danny Boyle's stage production of Frankenstein. It's the latest take on Mary Shelley's famous Gothic novel. But what's the book really about?

The idea emerged from a summer that didn't happen.

Due to the largest volcanic eruption for more than 1,600 years, in Indonesia in late 1815, the northern hemisphere was plunged into a freakishly cool and sunless summer the following year.

On the shores of Lake Geneva, the miserable weather kept five British tourists cooped up inside a villa for days, where they passed the time in a horror story-writing competition. The 19-year-old Mary Godwin, in Switzerland with poet Percy Shelley, envisioned "the hideous phantasm of a man" and turned her contribution into a novel published anonymously in 1818.

It told the story of a Swiss scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who is so horrified by the ugly creature he brings to life from assembled body parts that he abandons him, with terrible consequences.

Live screenings of Frankenstein

17 March: Benedict Cumberbatch as Creature, Jonny Lee Miller as Victor Frankenstein

24 March: Lee Miller as Creature, Cumberbatch as Frankenstein

Readers' new meanings for Frankenstein
Within a few years, the novel was being adapted for the stage, and in the 20th Century there were many memorable film versions that took the work in different directions. This week, a production by Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle at London's National Theatre is being screened live to 400 venues in 22 countries.

Nearly 200 years after that sunless summer, the novel is considered a landmark work and every decade brings a new interpretation. Here is a selection - some include plot details.

1. Science can go too far

The term "Frankenstein foods" - applied to genetically modified products - suggests the name of the novel has become a byword for bad science. But this metaphor is unfair, says Angela Wright, a lecturer in Romantic literature at the University of Sheffield.

"There's evidence that she was very conversant with the scientists of her day. But she believed in the sanctity of human life and knew the work of Lawrence and Abernethy, who were working in Edinburgh in the 1810s in dissection theatres, on the re-animation of corpses. [Her husband] Percy Shelley was also very interested in that."

Frankenstein on screen

1910: Thomas Edison makes first film

1931: Boris Karloff (above) plays the monster

1957-1974: Hammer Films produce a series of Frankenstein movies featuring Peter Cushing

1974: Young Frankenstein parody by Mel Brooks

1994: Kenneth Branagh's film returns to novel

2011: Frankenstein's Wedding, BBC Three

Frankenstein's Wedding
She thought these people had crossed a line, says Wright, but she had a lot of admiration for scientific thought in general.

2. Actions have consequences

It's not just the responsibility of creating life that Shelley wants to emphasise, says Wright, and this is clear in the letters of Robert Walton that frame the Frankenstein story - the wider narrative that is often overlooked.

Walton is the seafarer who rescues Frankenstein from an ice float deep in the Arctic, as the scientist pursues the monster. Encouraged by Frankenstein, the captain ignores the pleas of his crew to to turn back, actions that Shelley appears to condemn.

"Walton doesn't take responsibility for the safety of his men and that is criticised within the novel. He comes round but regretfully, simply because the atmospheric conditions are against him, not out of concern for his men.

"He seems to be a very shadowy double of Victor Frankenstein in many ways, because he pants for tales of romance and adventure in the same way."

A life among the literati

1797: Born in London to two major literary figures, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin

1814: Meets one of father's acolytes, the married Percy Shelley, with whom she runs off to France

1815: Gives birth prematurely and baby dies

1816: Begins Frankenstein in wet summer on Lake Geneva with Shelley, Lord Byron and others

Dec 1816: Shelley's wife dies, he marries Mary

1818: Frankenstein published

1822: Percy Shelley dies

1851: Dies after long writing career

3. Don't play God

"As suggested by the novel's subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, Victor Frankenstein is an example of the Romantic over-reacher, who transgresses boundaries between the human and the divine," says Marie Mulvey-Roberts, author of Dangerous Bodies: Corporeality and the Gothic.

According to Greek myth, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man, and suffered eternal punishment. The sense that Frankenstein has pursued forbidden knowledge is further underlined by the references to Milton's Paradise Lost, a work the creature reads and recites. His rejection by his creator can be seen as a second Fall of Man.

4. A warning about freed slaves

Shelley was writing the novel a mere 10 years after the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire, and she did so in Bath, not far from the port of Bristol, where many of the slaving ships departed the country. There are references to it in the novel, says Mulvey-Roberts.

"Frankenstein says he is enslaved to his work, and the creature escapes like a refugee slave, pursued by his master. But then there's a power shift, so you get a hegemonic master-slave dialectic where the slave is a master and the master is a slave to his work and to his obsession.

"Mary Shelley was certainly no supporter of slavery but she did not protest when [Foreign Secretary George] Canning used the analogy of the Frankenstein as a spectre warning of the danger of slaves being emancipated too quickly. In the novel when the creature assumes mastery, he causes mayhem leading to the loss of life."

5. Shelley's maternal guilt

The rejected child

The novel can be read as a critique of the family as much as a longing for one. The monster can be seen as a way of coping with the loss of her mother shortly after Mary Shelley's birth as well as the loss of her own babies. It deals with the rejection, the lack of nurture - Victor's solitary male propagation.
"It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils... It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form?" (Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Chapter five)
Marie Mulvey-Roberts

Many critics think the novel is shaped by the tragic events in Shelley's own life. Her mother died days after she was born and Shelley herself lost her first child, born prematurely.

The first feminist interpretation of Frankenstein was by Ellen Moers, who read Shelley's novel as a sublimated afterbirth, says Diane Hoeveler, from Marquette University in Wisconsin, US.

"The author expels her own guilt both for having caused her mother's death and for having failed to produce a healthy son for Percy, as his legal wife Harriet had done three months earlier.

"For Moers, the novel's strength was to present the 'abnormal, or monstrous, manifestations of the child-parent tie' and in so doing, 'to transform the standard Romantic matter of incest, infanticide, and patricide into a phantasmagoria of the nursery'."

6. Post-natal depression

The feminist movement has championed the elevation of Mary Shelley to canonical rank, says Prof John Sutherland, former Booker Prize judge and an expert on Victorian fiction. And there are moments when the creation appears to be presented as a birth and Victor Frankenstein as a stricken mother.

Is this, asks Sutherland, inventor's remorse or post-natal depression?

7. Monsters are not born monsters

The creature's initial innocence suggests you are not born a monster, says Vic Sage, a professor at the University of East Anglia who has written extensively on the Gothic tradition.

"When he looks into the pool and sees himself, you want to shout out at him 'You're not a monster, you're OK.'"

The violence of Irish nationalism

Within decades of the book's publication, the central theme was picked up by cartoonists and used satirically, says Chris Baldick, author of In Frankenstein's Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity and Nineteenth-Century Writing.

In 1843, a cartoon entitled The Irish Frankenstein appeared in Punch, and depicted Irish political leader Daniel O'Connell being threatened by a thuggish Irish peasant.

Forty years later, Charles Parnell appeared in the same magazine after the Phoenix Park murders, cowering from a simian-looking creature.

The inference in both cartoons was that the politicians had helped to create a monster.

Many of the Hammer films didn't even give the monster a voice, he says, only capable of grunting the odd word.

"Even with [director] James Whale, it doesn't ever feel like history could ever be on Boris Karloff's side. They are thought to be great films but they missed the point of the book.

"Mary Shelley gave him a voice. It's great that he talks like an 18th Century philosopher because then you have this disparity between his appearance and his speech, which tests the viewer."

8. Difference should be celebrated, not shunned

Today's society has a greater understanding of the notion of difference, says Dr Sage, so the scene where Frankenstein rejects his creation, so repulsed is he by his disfigurement, has a wider resonance.

"Everyone reading it now knows that she's dramatising difference in the most absolute way possible. Differences in race and class. That's why it's very important to think that the creature is a creature and not a monster, and that he has a voice."

9. Vive la revolution

Frankenstein's creature has been interpreted as symbolic of the revolutionary thought which had swept through Europe in the 1790s, but had largely petered out by the time Shelley wrote the novel.

Critics said the creature's failure to prosper and the havoc unleashed was evidence that Shelley was anti-revolution, unlike her radical parents and husband, and supportive of the old order.

But by applying modern values to the narrative, it is clear that the failings lie with man, the creator, and not the creature, says Dr Sage.

"That's the notorious riddle: Who is the 'new Prometheus' of the title - Victor or his creature? You can read into it that it's a failure of the revolution that he represents, but only if you don't have the psychological and social attitudes of today."

10. Christian allegory

The book is really a dialogue between reactionary and progressive points of view, says Sage, and this applies to the question of the presence of Milton and the Christian story - the treatment of the Fall - which it puts under the glass.

"The creature has read Milton but, as he says, he feels more like the fallen angel than Adam in that story, because he has to play the part of the outcast. Mary Shelley dramatises the conflict between the Romantic view of Satan as a Promethean hero, out to take God's place, which was the projection of a set of male poets - Blake, Shelley, Byron and Goethe, for example - and the havoc that such idealistic projects wreak domestically, in people's actual lives."

Here is a selection of readers' new meanings for Frankenstein.

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A global cinema audience will this week watch Danny Boyle's stage production of Frankenstein. It's the latest take on Mary Shelley's famous Gothic novel. But what's the book really about? The idea emerged from a summer that didn't happen.