Frankenstein’s Mom: Radical
A Primer on a Radical Vein of English Literature
It was a freaky night at Lake Geneva in Switzerland: chilly for a summer evening, relentlessly rainy. Then again, most nights were rainy that year. A volcanic eruption the previous year in Tambora, Indonesia, in 1815 had spewed tons of ash into the atmosphere, disrupting the climate all the way to Europe.
On this particular night, four English folks were hanging out together on vacation. It was an esteemed group. Dr. John Polidori, a wiz kid who had become a doctor at the age of 19; the great English poet Lord Byron; the up-and-coming poet Percy Shelley; and Shelley’s girlfriend, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.
This was before the age of TV or radio or even board games. So the group sat around and talked. And talked. They talked about new ideas and scientific discoveries, especially the exciting prospects of electricity. They speculated that electricity could change the world, that it might even be used to reanimate human corpses.
Then the conversation grew ghostly. Byron produced a rare copy of the book of German horror stories, Fantasmagoriana. The group read aloud from it, then talked of Gothic things. The discussion got so intense, Percy Shelley couldn’t take it any longer and ran from the room, shrieking.
