1818: Mary Shelley and the Vermicelli of Doom
The Secret Origins of the Frankenstein Phenomenon
This is the first part of a two-part article in a series entitled “The History of Science Fiction”. When did the genre we all know and love as ‘Science Fiction’ really begin? Who did it begin with? H. G. Wells? Jules Verne? Mary Shelley? Cyrano de Bergerac? Thomas More? Lucian of Samosata? In this series, we’ll take a close look at some famous works in search of interesting facts concerning their creation, and also unveil some obscure titles that have been forgotten by the mainstream but nevertheless exerted an influence on shaping the genre as we know it today.
First up— Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus.
From its first theatrical adaptation in 1823, to the recent movies Poor Things and Lisa Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s magnum opus has always been with us. Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus was published anonymously in 1818, a very common practice in Regency England, but Mary was revealed as the true author in 1823. A few years later, at her publisher’s request Mary wrote an introduction to the 1831 edition, explaining the inspirations and influences behind the writing of the novel. However, this fascinating document raises more questions than answers. In this article, we take a deep dive into the wording of that 1831 introduction, and so examine the background of a literary work that had a major role in shaping the 19th and 20th centuries … and in the 21st century, is more relevant now than it has ever been.
Mary Shelley opened the introduction thus:
The publishers of the standard novels, in selecting Frankenstein for one of their series, expressed a wish that I should furnish them with some account of the origin of the story.
And so it begins …
1: “I am the more willing to comply, because I shall thus give a general answer to the question, so frequently asked me — how I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea.”
One obvious answer to how a young lady could have such a “hideous” idea is that so many young ladies of the time were reading Gothic literature.
Gothic Horror stands out as one of the oldest horror genres, emerging alongside the Romantic movement in the late 18th century. It thrives on the thrill and fear of the unknown, placing a heavy emphasis on creating an atmospheric experience. It’s also the grandparent of Science Fiction, Mystery, Fantasy, Romance, Thriller, and the Adventure genres.
The term ‘Gothic’ itself originates from a style of architecture developed in the Middle Ages, known in the early 19th century as grand cathedrals, abbeys and castles, some of which had fallen into ruin and disrepair over the centuries. Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries were drawn to these ruins for their mysterious and melancholic aura, as well as their connection to a perceived barbaric past. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, published in 1764, is often credited as the first Gothic horror novel. He drew heavily from Shakespeare’s works, particularly Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet, setting the stage for a wave of Gothic writers including Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. Gothic Horror had its counterparts across Europe, notably in Germany with authors like E. T. A. Hoffmann and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe putting their own spin on the genre.
As Mary Shelley was familiar with such contemporary literary trends as well as what her father considered “the classics”, it was to be expected that she would make liberal use of Gothic tropes, when her companions at the Villa Diodati encouraged her to write ‘a ghost story’. What makes Frankenstein unique, however, is its approach to the age-old theme of humans creating life by extraordinary means. Instead of embracing sorcery and forbidden knowledge from a distant past, as Matthew Lewis did, or revealing a mundane reason for uncanny events, as Anne Radcliffe did, Mary Shelley replaced the supernatural or faux-supernatural causes of the plot’s events with innovations drawn from contemporary scientific discussions.
2. “It is not singular that, as the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity, I should very early in life have thought of writing.”
Mary had a brilliant but very unconventional education. Her mother, the trailblazing feminist theorist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97), passionately advocated for gender equality in her renowned work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), particularly in education. Meanwhile her father, the radical writer and philosopher William Godwin (1756–1836), was the author of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and a political novel Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (both 1794) which underscored the common humanity of all individuals, laying blame on governments and other institutions for perpetuating injustice and inequality. Both Godwin and Wollstonecraft are widely recognized as key figures in the development of both feminism and anarchism.
Mary Wollstonecraft fell ill with a fever shortly after giving birth to her daughter Mary, and tragically passed away less than two weeks later at just 38 years old. She had been married to William for less than six months.
3. “I lived principally in the country as a girl, and passed a considerable time in Scotland … my habitual residence was on the blank and dreary northern shores of the Tay, near Dundee … on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near … my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered.”
There were two burgeoning movements at that time; the Gothic and the Romantic. Both of them had a strong connection to the natural, the numinous, the liminal, and the transcendent. Romanticism, a sweeping development in Western European artistic, intellectual, and philosophical life during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, didn’t have a singular unified manifesto. We understand it now from its emphasis on the individual, their emotional and aesthetic reactions to nature, and their rejection of established authorities and structures, whether moral, religious, artistic, or governmental. This gave rise to numerous other trends, such as radical politics, utopian ideals, a belief in scientific and political progress as spiritual principles, and the idealization of the Romantic hero — a figure who wandered, melancholic and alienated from society, yet attuned to the universe’s transcendent qualities. Romanticism also encapsulates a notion known as ‘the Sublime,’ which transcends ordinary human experience and explanation. Initially associated with beauty and grandeur, it later encompassed grotesqueness and terror as the movement evolved. This quality could be found in natural landscapes or in settings like ruins and their atmosphere of decay.
4. “After this (Mary’s childhood) my life became busier, and reality stood in place of fiction. My husband, however, was from the first, very anxious that I should prove myself worthy of my parentage, and enrol myself on the page of fame. He was for ever inciting me to obtain literary reputation, which even on my own part I cared for then, though since I have become infinitely indifferent to it.”
Prominent literary figures like Samuel Coleridge, Charles Lamb, and William Hazlitt often frequented Mary’s residence. In 1812, Mary’s father engaged in correspondence with a talented young poet, the 19-year-old Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose letters captivated the female members of the Godwin family. Percy and his then-spouse Harriet had previously dined with William Godwin and Mary Jane Clairmont (the new Mrs. Godwin) in November of that year, but it wasn’t until May of 1814 that he met their daughter, Mary. By then, his marriage with Harriet was on the rocks, and he and the 16-year-old Mary started dating in June. Although Mary’s father had previously endorsed open relationships and free love, he swiftly changed his stance (like many fathers would) when it concerned his own daughter getting involved with a young man of shady reputation, and he prohibited Mary from seeing him. However, as impulsive young hearts are prone to do, they disregarded his commands and embarked on a scandalous affair.
5. “In the summer of 1816, we visited Switzerland, and became the neighbours of Lord Byron. At first we spent our pleasant hours on the lake, or wandering on its shores; and Lord Byron, who was writing the third canto of Childe Harold, was the only one among us who put his thoughts upon paper …”
In May 1816, amidst mounting debt, Percy, Mary, their newborn baby William, and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont left England (at Claire’s instigation) and headed for Lake Geneva, where they planned to meet the poet, writer and all-round hell-raiser, Lord Byron. All the group had read his poems, and Mary had met him briefly, but only Claire knew him relatively well. They met on May 26th, 1816, and stayed at the Villa Diodati, a mansion near Lake Geneva that Byron was renting.
6. “But it proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house.”
At that time, the world was experiencing an unprecedented climatic anomaly known as the “Year Without a Summer.” The primary cause was the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in April 1815. This volcanic eruption was one of the most powerful in recorded history, ejecting massive amounts of volcanic ash, sulfur dioxide, and other gases into the atmosphere. They circled the globe, blocking sunlight and lowering temperatures in many parts of the world.
Crop failures and food shortages led to widespread hunger and poverty, sparking social unrest and migration in many affected regions. The economic upheaval caused by the failed harvests contributed to political instability and revolutionary movements in Europe and beyond.
It also led Mary and her creative-minded companions to spend most of their time indoors, wondering what to do with themselves …
7. Some volumes of ghost stories, translated from the German into French, fell into our hands … I have not seen these stories since then; but their incidents are as fresh in my mind as if I had read them yesterday.
Between 1810 and 1815, a ghost story anthology called Gespensterbuch (The Ghost Book) was published in five volumes by the publishing company G. J. Göschen in Liepzig, Germany. The stories were written by A. Apel and F. Laun, the pen names of German authors Johann August Apel and Friedrich August Schulze.
The entire collection contained 34 stories; eight stories from the book were translated into French anonymously by author and geographer Jean-Baptiste Benoit Eyries as Fantasmagoriana, the title derived from the word ‘Phantasmagoria’, and published in Paris during 1812. An anonymous English translation entitled Tales of the Dead was published in England in 1813 by White, Cochrane and Co.. The translator was revealed in 1820 to be English author Sarah Utterton, who removed three stories from the French edition and added one story of her own, The Storm, which she claimed to be based on actual events.
As any well-educated English person was relatively fluent in French, the edition that the group read aloud to each other on that fateful evening was the French Fantasmagoriana. A few nights later at the Villa Diodati, on 18 June, Byron read the assembled company S. T. Coleridge’s poem Christabel, causing Percy to have the vivid hallucination of a woman with eyes instead of nipples recorded in Mary’s dairy. It was not, as in some erroneous retellings of the events at the Villa Diodati, Christabel that inspired the storytelling contest.
8. “‘We will each write a ghost story,’ said Lord Byron; and his proposition was acceded to. There were four of us …”
Easier said than done; Byron and Shelley started works but never finished them. However, Polidori (despite being the butt of everyone’s jokes in the Villa) was inspired to write something that eventually became a novella entitled The Vampyre. It was first published on 1st April 1819 by Henry Colburn in the New Monthly Magazine, to considerable popular acclaim, and was a major influence on future vampire-themed works, including Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Byron never completed the fragment he was working on, but during July 1816 he did finish writing the acclaimed Darkness, a Post-Apocalyptic epic poem that deserves an article of its own. Byron often stated in his correspondence and journals that it was the ominous gloom of that summer’s weather that led to the poem’s creation.
Poor Claire didn’t seem to get involved in the contest; she probably had other things on her mind.
9. “I busied myself to think of a story — One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror … “Have you thought of a story?” I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative … In all matters of discovery and invention, even of those that appertain to the imagination, we are continually reminded of the story of Columbus and his egg.”
“Columbus and his egg” refers to an apocryphal story documented by Girolamo Benzoni in his 1565 book ‘History of the New World’, and it signifies an original discovery or solution that appears obvious in hindsight.
After his momentous discovery of the American continent, apparently Christopher Columbus was in discussion with some Spanish noblemen who informed him that finding a new trade route was something that could have been achieved by any hard-working mariner. In response, Columbus asked his critics to try balancing an egg on one end, to make it stand up. After numerous failed attempts and much embarrassment, Columbus showed them how to do it — by tapping the egg to crack its tip slightly, flattening one end so it could stand on its own.
Of course, this story is considered ‘apocryphal’, so probably Columbus never did such a thing. A very similar tale had been related fifteen years earlier about the Renaissance architect Filippo Brunelleschi, (unfortunately I can’t find exactly who this was attributed to) who designed Florence Cathedral. Some say the dome of the cathedral has a flat tip, because it was inspired by the egg challenge that Brunelleschi gave to his puzzled audience.
10: “Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener … They talked of the experiments of Dr. Darwin … who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion.”
Vermicelli? What was she talking about? The classic novel Frankenstein was inspired by a limp and twitching strand of pasta? Surely not!
It turns out that the ‘Darwin’ Mary was referring to was not Charles, who was only seven years old at that time, but his grandfather and proto-evolutionist Erasmus Darwin (1731- 1802), who was a key figure in the study of “spontaneous generation,” the (alleged) sudden appearance of life from non-living matter.
Critics have speculated that “vermicelli” was Mary’s misrepresentation of Vorticellae — microscopic aquatic organisms that Erasmus is known to have worked with. Erasmus was also a poet as well as a physician, philosopher and abolitionist, and in his posthumous work The Temple of Nature AKA The Origin of Society (1803), the lines -
Hence without parent by spontaneous birth
Rise the first specks of animated earth,
- are accompanied by a 3,500-word additional note titled Spontaneous Vitality of Microscopic Animals. Here, Darwin describes the experiment alluded to by Mary Shelley:
“Some of the microscopic animals are said to remain dead for many days or weeks, when the fluid in which they existed is dried up, and quickly to recover life and motion by the fresh addition of water and warmth.”
Strangely enough, this is referenced in the 1974 film Young Frankenstein, directed by Mel Brooks, in the “preservation of life” lecture scene.
Mention of ‘spontaneous generation’ also reminds us of the Golem from Jewish folklore, a man-shaped creature molded of mud or clay, and animated by divine will. The earliest stories date from the 5th century Talmud, and while there have been many accounts of Golem creation throughout history, the most famous tale is that associated with the Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel (1526–1609). He was said to have created a Golem from riverbank mud and brought it to life with incantations and rituals, to defend the Prague ghetto from antisemitic attackers.
This dive is so deep, we’ve split it into two parts. Click here for Part Two!
The first volume of “Age of Steam”, exploring the roots of the modern Science Fiction phenomenon and containing the full text of the landmark books, is now available here!
