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Victor Frankenstein, born in Naples to an upper-class Genevese family, spends his youth obsessed with alchemy. As he grows older, he develops an interest in modern sciences such as chemistry and electricity. After his mother Caroline dies of scarlet fever, Victor leaves home to attend the University of Ingolstadt. Through his studies, Victor discovers a new way to create life, assembling human body parts stolen from charnel houses and fresh graves, which he uses to create a large and grotesque humanoid creature. When the creature awakens, Victor is repelled by it and flees in terror, returning the next day to find the creature gone.

The newly conscious creature runs away, discovers fire, and learns to avoid humans, who find him frightening. He finds a hovel attached to a small house, which lets him observe a family while remaining unseen. As the family teaches their language to a foreigner, the creature also learns to speak and write. He also finds a collection of books, including Paradise Lost, and learns to read. He reads some papers that had been in the clothes he had taken from Ingolstadt, through which he learns the truth of his origin and the identity of his creator. He finally reveals himself to the family's blind father while he is alone, who treats him with kindness. When the rest of the family return however, they are horrified by his appearance and chase him away. The creature then saves a young girl from drowning, only to be shot by her father, who had misunderstood, and thought the creature had attacked her.

Embittered by humanity, the creature travels to Geneva to confront his creator; upon arrival, he encounters Victor's younger brother, William. Realizing that William belongs to the same family, the creature kills him, then frames the family's servant Justine for his death. Victor suspects his creature was responsible, but does not intervene while Justine is tried and executed. Later, while hiking on Mer de Glace, Victor once more encounters the creature. The creature relays his story and asks Victor to create a female companion, which he believes will be his only chance at happiness. Victor consents to this.

"Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other, and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due. Remember, that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous."

— The Creature asks Victor Frankenstein to create a female companion.

Victor and his friend Henry Clerval leave the European mainland for Britain, where Victor establishes a laboratory in Orkney. While working on the female creature, Victor imagines his creations giving birth, and fearfully decides to destroy the incomplete female. The original creature issues a warning that he will meet Victor on his wedding night, and murders Henry in an act of revenge.

Victor suffers a mental breakdown, then returns home. Back in Geneva, Victor marries Elizabeth Lavenza, a childhood friend born in Italy. Fulfilling his threat, the creature murders her on the wedding night. Days later, Victor's father Alphonse dies of grief. With no remaining family (besides his other brother Ernest), Victor vows revenge and pursues the creature, eventually following him to the Arctic.

Chasing the creature across Arctic ice, Victor nearly dies from exhaustion and hypothermia, but is rescued by Captain Robert Walton, who is leading an expedition to the North Pole. Victor recounts his story to Walton and encourages the crew to continue their expedition; instead, they decide to abandon their journey and turn back. Victor vows that he will go on chasing the creature, but in his weakened state, he dies aboard the ship. As the ship leaves the Arctic, the creature comes on board. He mourns Victor's death, tells Walton he plans to burn himself on a pyre, and departs.

Author's background

=================

Mary Shelley's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died from infection eleven days after giving birth to her. Shelley grew close to her father, William Godwin. Godwin hired a nurse, who briefly cared for her and her half-sister, before marrying his second wife, Mary Jane Clairmont, who did not like the close bond between Shelley and her father. The resulting friction caused Godwin to favour his other children.

Shelley's father was a famous author of the time, and her education was of great importance to him, although it was not formal. Shelley grew up surrounded by her father's friends, writers, and persons of political importance, who often gathered at the family home. This inspired her authorship at an early age. Mary, at the age of sixteen, met Percy Bysshe Shelley (who later became her husband) 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 22 February 1815, Shelley gave birth prematurely to her first child, Clara, who died two weeks later.

In the summer of 1816, Mary, Percy, and Claire took a trip to visit Claire's lover, Lord Byron, in Geneva. Poor weather conditions, more akin to winter, forced Byron and the visitors to stay indoors. Byron suggested that he, Mary, Percy, and Byron's physician, John Polidori, each try writing a ghost story. Mary was 20 years old when her novel Frankenstein was published.

Literary influences

=================

Shelley's work was heavily influenced by that of her parents. Her father was famous for his 1793 book Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and her mother famous for the 1792 essay A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Her father's novels also influenced her writing of Frankenstein. These novels included Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), St. Leon, and Fleetwood. All of these books were set in Switzerland, similar to the setting in Frankenstein. Some major themes of social affections and the renewal of life that appear in Shelley's novel stem from these works she had in her possession. Other literary influences that appear in Frankenstein are Pygmalion et Galatée by Madame de Genlis, and Ovid, with the use of individuals identifying the problems with society. Ovid also inspires the use of Prometheus in the book's subtitle.

The influence of John Milton's Paradise Lost and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner are evident in the novel. In The Frankenstein of the French Revolution, author Julia Douthwaite posits that Shelley probably acquired some ideas for Frankenstein's character from Humphry Davy's book Elements of Chemical Philosophy, in which he had written that,

science has ... bestowed upon man powers which may be called creative; which have enabled him to change and modify the beings around him ...

References to the French Revolution run through the novel; a possible source is François-Félix Nogaret's Le Miroir des événemens actuels, ou la Belle au plus offrant (1790), a political parable about scientific progress featuring an inventor named "Wak-wik-vauk-an-son-frankésteïn", then abridged as Frankésteïn, who creates a life-sized automaton. However there is no evidence Shelley had read it.

Both Frankenstein and the monster quote passages from Percy Shelley's 1816 poem, "Mutability", and its theme of the role of the subconscious is discussed in prose. Percy Shelley's name never appears as the author of the poem, although the novel credits other quoted poets by name. Coleridge's poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) is associated with the theme of guilt and William Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" (1798) with that of innocence.

Many writers and historians have attempted to associate several then-popular natural philosophers (now called physical scientists) with Shelley's work because of several notable similarities. Two of the most noted natural philosophers among Shelley's contemporaries were Italian Giovanni Aldini, who made many public attempts at human reanimation through bio-electric Galvanism in London, and Johann Konrad Dippel, who was supposed to have developed chemical means to extend the life span of humans. While Shelley was aware of both of these men and their activities, she makes no mention of or reference to them or their experiments in any of her published or released notes.

Ideas about life and death discussed by Percy and Byron were of great interest to scientists of the time. 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.

Shelley's personal experiences also influenced the themes within Frankenstein. The themes of loss, guilt, and the consequences of defying nature present in the novel all developed from Mary Shelley's own 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 the theme of guilt stemmed from her not feeling good enough for Percy because of the loss of their child.

Composition

=================

During the rainy summer of 1816, the "Year Without a Summer", the world was locked in a long, cold volcanic winter caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. Mary Shelley, aged 18, and her lover (and future husband), Percy Bysshe Shelley, visited Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva, in the Swiss Alps. The weather was too cold and dreary that summer to enjoy the outdoor holiday activities they had planned, so the group retired indoors until dawn.

Sitting around a log fire at Byron's villa, the company amused themselves by reading German ghost stories translated into French from the book Fantasmagoriana. Byron proposed that they "each write a ghost story." Unable to think of a story, Mary Shelley became anxious. She recalled being asked "Have you thought of a story?" each morning, and every time being "forced to reply with a mortifying negative." During one evening in the middle of summer, the discussions 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". It was after midnight before they retired and, unable to sleep, she became possessed by her imagination as she beheld the "grim terrors" of her "waking dream".

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 endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.

In September 2011, astronomer Donald Olson, after a visit to the Lake Geneva villa in the previous year and inspecting data about the motion of the moon and stars, concluded that her "waking dream" took place between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. on 16 June 1816, several days after the initial idea by Lord Byron that they each write a ghost story.

Mary Shelley began writing what she assumed would be a short story, but with Percy Shelley's encouragement, she expanded the tale into a fully-fledged novel. She later described that summer in Switzerland as the moment "when I first stepped out from childhood into life." Shelley wrote the first four chapters in the weeks following the suicide of her half-sister Fanny. This was one of many personal tragedies that impacted Shelley's work. Shelley's first child died in infancy, and when she began composing Frankenstein in 1816, she was probably nursing her second child, who was also dead by the time of Frankenstein's publication.

Shelley wrote much of the book while residing in a lodging house in the centre of Bath, England in 1816. According to The Guardian, "By all accounts, Shelley came to Bath to hide. Yet she found deep wells of inspiration while living in the shadow of the city's gothic abbey, particularly among Bath's medical community. Significantly, 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 when she was writing about Victor Frankenstein breaking taboos by using galvanism to shock life into a creature stitched together from dead body parts."

Byron managed to write just a fragment based on the vampire legends he heard while travelling the Balkans, and from this John Polidori created The Vampyre (1819), the progenitor of the romantic vampire literary genre. Thus two seminal horror tales originated from the conclave.

The group talked about Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment ideas as well. Mary Shelley believed the Enlightenment idea that society could progress and grow if political leaders used their powers responsibly; however, she also believed the Romantic ideal that misused power could destroy society.

Shelley's manuscripts for the first three-volume edition in 1818 (written 1816–1817), as well as the fair copy for her publisher, are now housed in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The Bodleian acquired the papers in 2004, and they belong now to the Abinger Collection. In 2008, the Bodleian published a new edition of Frankenstein, edited by Charles E. Robinson, that contains comparisons of Mary Shelley's original text with Percy Shelley's additions and interventions alongside.

Frankenstein and the Monster

=================

The Creature

=================

Although the Creature was described in later works as a composite of whole body parts grafted together from cadavers and reanimated by the use of electricity, this description is not consistent with Shelley's work; both the use of electricity and the cobbled-together image of Frankenstein's monster were more the result of James Whale's popular 1931 film adaptation of the story and other early motion-picture works based on the creature. The impact of James Whale's adaptation is noteworthy enough that in a 2025 publication of Frankenstein, the introduction by Jeanette Winterson erroneously references the use of a massive jolt of electricity to imbue life in the creature. In Shelley's original work, Victor Frankenstein discovers a previously unknown but elemental principle of life, and that insight allows him to develop a method to imbue vitality into inanimate matter, though the exact nature of the process is left ambiguous. After a great deal of hesitation in exercising this power, Frankenstein spends two years painstakingly constructing the Creature's body (one anatomical feature at a time, from raw materials supplied by "the dissecting room and the slaughter-house"), which he then brings to life using his unspecified process.

Frankenstein does not give him a name. Instead, Frankenstein's creation is referred to by words such as "wretch", "monster", "creature", "demon", "devil", "fiend", and "it". When Frankenstein converses with the creature, he addresses him as "vile insect", "abhorred monster", "fiend", "wretched devil", and "abhorred devil".

In the novel, the creature is compared to Adam, the first man in the Garden of Eden. The monster also compares himself with the fallen angel. Speaking to Frankenstein, the monster says "I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel". That angel would be Lucifer (meaning "light-bringer") in Milton's Paradise Lost, which the monster has read. Adam is also referred to in the epigraph of the 1818 edition:

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould Me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?

Some have posited the creature as a composite of Percy Shelley and Thomas Paine. If the creature's hatred for Victor and his desire to raise a child mirror Percy's filial rebelliousness and his longing to adopt children, his desire to do good and his persecution can be said to echo Paine's utopian visions and fate in England.

The Creature has often been mistakenly called Frankenstein. In 1908, one author said "It is strange to note how well-nigh universally the term 'Frankenstein' is misused, even by intelligent people, as describing some hideous monster." Edith Wharton's The Reef (1916) describes an unruly child as an "infant Frankenstein". David Lindsay's "The Bridal Ornament", published in The Rover, 12 June 1844, mentioned "the maker of poor Frankenstein." After the release of Whale's cinematic Frankenstein, the public at large began speaking of the Creature itself as "Frankenstein". This misnomer continued with the successful sequel Bride of Frankenstein (1935), as well as in film titles such as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

Origin of Victor Frankenstein's name

=================

Mary Shelley maintained that she derived the name Frankenstein from a dream-vision. This claim has since been disputed and debated by scholars that have suggested alternative sources for Shelley's inspiration. The German name Frankenstein means "stone of the Franks", and is associated with various places in Germany, including Frankenstein Castle (Burg Frankenstein) in Darmstadt, Hesse, and Frankenstein Castle in Frankenstein, a village in the Palatinate. There is also a castle called Frankenstein in Bad Salzungen, Thuringia, and a municipality called Frankenstein in Saxony. The town of Frankenstein in Silesia (now Ząbkowice, Poland) was the site of a scandal involving gravediggers in 1606, and this has been suggested as an inspiration to the author. Finally, the name is borne by the aristocratic House of Franckenstein from Franconia.

Radu Florescu argued that Mary and Percy Shelley visited Frankenstein Castle near Darmstadt in 1814, where alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel had experimented with human bodies, and reasoned that Mary suppressed mention of her visit to maintain her public claim of originality. A literary essay by A.J. Day supports Florescu's position that Mary Shelley knew of and visited Frankenstein Castle before writing her debut novel. Day includes details of an alleged description of the Frankenstein castle in Mary Shelley's "lost journals". However, according to Jörg Heléne, Day's and Florescu's claims cannot be verified.

=================

Victor Frankenstein, born in Naples to an upper-class Genevese family, spends his youth obsessed with alchemy. As he grows older, he develops an interest in modern sciences such as chemistry and electricity. After his mother Caroline dies of scarlet fever, Victor leaves home to attend the University of Ingolstadt. Through his studies, Victor discovers a new way to create life, assembling human body parts stolen from charnel houses and fresh graves, which he uses to create a large and grotesque humanoid creature. When the creature awakens, Victor is repelled by it and flees in terror, returning the next day to find the creature gone.

The newly conscious creature runs away, discovers fire, and learns to avoid humans, who find him frightening. He finds a hovel attached to a small house, which lets him observe a family while remaining unseen. As the family teaches their language to a foreigner, the creature also learns to speak and write. He also finds a collection of books, including Paradise Lost, and learns to read. He reads some papers that had been in the clothes he had taken from Ingolstadt, through which he learns the truth of his origin and the identity of his creator. He finally reveals himself to the family's blind father while he is alone, who treats him with kindness. When the rest of the family return however, they are horrified by his appearance and chase him away. The creature then saves a young girl from drowning, only to be shot by her father, who had misunderstood, and thought the creature had attacked her.

Embittered by humanity, the creature travels to Geneva to confront his creator; upon arrival, he encounters Victor's younger brother, William. Realizing that William belongs to the same family, the creature kills him, then frames the family's servant Justine for his death. Victor suspects his creature was responsible, but does not intervene while Justine is tried and executed. Later, while hiking on Mer de Glace, Victor once more encounters the creature. The creature relays his story and asks Victor to create a female companion, which he believes will be his only chance at happiness. Victor consents to this.

"Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other, and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due. Remember, that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous."

— The Creature asks Victor Frankenstein to create a female companion.

Victor and his friend Henry Clerval leave the European mainland for Britain, where Victor establishes a laboratory in Orkney. While working on the female creature, Victor imagines his creations giving birth, and fearfully decides to destroy the incomplete female. The original creature issues a warning that he will meet Victor on his wedding night, and murders Henry in an act of revenge.

Victor suffers a mental breakdown, then returns home. Back in Geneva, Victor marries Elizabeth Lavenza, a childhood friend born in Italy. Fulfilling his threat, the creature murders her on the wedding night. Days later, Victor's father Alphonse dies of grief. With no remaining family (besides his other brother Ernest), Victor vows revenge and pursues the creature, eventually following him to the Arctic.

Chasing the creature across Arctic ice, Victor nearly dies from exhaustion and hypothermia, but is rescued by Captain Robert Walton, who is leading an expedition to the North Pole. Victor recounts his story to Walton and encourages the crew to continue their expedition; instead, they decide to abandon their journey and turn back. Victor vows that he will go on chasing the creature, but in his weakened state, he dies aboard the ship. As the ship leaves the Arctic, the creature comes on board. He mourns Victor's death, tells Walton he plans to burn himself on a pyre, and departs.

Author's background

=================

Mary Shelley's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died from infection eleven days after giving birth to her. Shelley grew close to her father, William Godwin. Godwin hired a nurse, who briefly cared for her and her half-sister, before marrying his second wife, Mary Jane Clairmont, who did not like the close bond between Shelley and her father. The resulting friction caused Godwin to favour his other children.

Shelley's father was a famous author of the time, and her education was of great importance to him, although it was not formal. Shelley grew up surrounded by her father's friends, writers, and persons of political importance, who often gathered at the family home. This inspired her authorship at an early age. Mary, at the age of sixteen, met Percy Bysshe Shelley (who later became her husband) 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 22 February 1815, Shelley gave birth prematurely to her first child, Clara, who died two weeks later.

In the summer of 1816, Mary, Percy, and Claire took a trip to visit Claire's lover, Lord Byron, in Geneva. Poor weather conditions, more akin to winter, forced Byron and the visitors to stay indoors. Byron suggested that he, Mary, Percy, and Byron's physician, John Polidori, each try writing a ghost story. Mary was 20 years old when her novel Frankenstein was published.

Literary influences

=================

Shelley's work was heavily influenced by that of her parents. Her father was famous for his 1793 book Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and her mother famous for the 1792 essay A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Her father's novels also influenced her writing of Frankenstein. These novels included Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), St. Leon, and Fleetwood. All of these books were set in Switzerland, similar to the setting in Frankenstein. Some major themes of social affections and the renewal of life that appear in Shelley's novel stem from these works she had in her possession. Other literary influences that appear in Frankenstein are Pygmalion et Galatée by Madame de Genlis, and Ovid, with the use of individuals identifying the problems with society. Ovid also inspires the use of Prometheus in the book's subtitle.

The influence of John Milton's Paradise Lost and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner are evident in the novel. In The Frankenstein of the French Revolution, author Julia Douthwaite posits that Shelley probably acquired some ideas for Frankenstein's character from Humphry Davy's book Elements of Chemical Philosophy, in which he had written that,

science has ... bestowed upon man powers which may be called creative; which have enabled him to change and modify the beings around him ...

References to the French Revolution run through the novel; a possible source is François-Félix Nogaret's Le Miroir des événemens actuels, ou la Belle au plus offrant (1790), a political parable about scientific progress featuring an inventor named "Wak-wik-vauk-an-son-frankésteïn", then abridged as Frankésteïn, who creates a life-sized automaton. However there is no evidence Shelley had read it.

Both Frankenstein and the monster quote passages from Percy Shelley's 1816 poem, "Mutability", and its theme of the role of the subconscious is discussed in prose. Percy Shelley's name never appears as the author of the poem, although the novel credits other quoted poets by name. Coleridge's poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) is associated with the theme of guilt and William Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" (1798) with that of innocence.

Many writers and historians have attempted to associate several then-popular natural philosophers (now called physical scientists) with Shelley's work because of several notable similarities. Two of the most noted natural philosophers among Shelley's contemporaries were Italian Giovanni Aldini, who made many public attempts at human reanimation through bio-electric Galvanism in London, and Johann Konrad Dippel, who was supposed to have developed chemical means to extend the life span of humans. While Shelley was aware of both of these men and their activities, she makes no mention of or reference to them or their experiments in any of her published or released notes.

Ideas about life and death discussed by Percy and Byron were of great interest to scientists of the time. 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.

Shelley's personal experiences also influenced the themes within Frankenstein. The themes of loss, guilt, and the consequences of defying nature present in the novel all developed from Mary Shelley's own 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 the theme of guilt stemmed from her not feeling good enough for Percy because of the loss of their child.

Composition

=================

During the rainy summer of 1816, the "Year Without a Summer", the world was locked in a long, cold volcanic winter caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. Mary Shelley, aged 18, and her lover (and future husband), Percy Bysshe Shelley, visited Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva, in the Swiss Alps. The weather was too cold and dreary that summer to enjoy the outdoor holiday activities they had planned, so the group retired indoors until dawn.

Sitting around a log fire at Byron's villa, the company amused themselves by reading German ghost stories translated into French from the book Fantasmagoriana. Byron proposed that they "each write a ghost story." Unable to think of a story, Mary Shelley became anxious. She recalled being asked "Have you thought of a story?" each morning, and every time being "forced to reply with a mortifying negative." During one evening in the middle of summer, the discussions 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". It was after midnight before they retired and, unable to sleep, she became possessed by her imagination as she beheld the "grim terrors" of her "waking dream".

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 endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.

In September 2011, astronomer Donald Olson, after a visit to the Lake Geneva villa in the previous year and inspecting data about the motion of the moon and stars, concluded that her "waking dream" took place between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. on 16 June 1816, several days after the initial idea by Lord Byron that they each write a ghost story.

Mary Shelley began writing what she assumed would be a short story, but with Percy Shelley's encouragement, she expanded the tale into a fully-fledged novel. She later described that summer in Switzerland as the moment "when I first stepped out from childhood into life." Shelley wrote the first four chapters in the weeks following the suicide of her half-sister Fanny. This was one of many personal tragedies that impacted Shelley's work. Shelley's first child died in infancy, and when she began composing Frankenstein in 1816, she was probably nursing her second child, who was also dead by the time of Frankenstein's publication.

Shelley wrote much of the book while residing in a lodging house in the centre of Bath, England in 1816. According to The Guardian, "By all accounts, Shelley came to Bath to hide. Yet she found deep wells of inspiration while living in the shadow of the city's gothic abbey, particularly among Bath's medical community. Significantly, 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 when she was writing about Victor Frankenstein breaking taboos by using galvanism to shock life into a creature stitched together from dead body parts."

Byron managed to write just a fragment based on the vampire legends he heard while travelling the Balkans, and from this John Polidori created The Vampyre (1819), the progenitor of the romantic vampire literary genre. Thus two seminal horror tales originated from the conclave.

The group talked about Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment ideas as well. Mary Shelley believed the Enlightenment idea that society could progress and grow if political leaders used their powers responsibly; however, she also believed the Romantic ideal that misused power could destroy society.

Shelley's manuscripts for the first three-volume edition in 1818 (written 1816–1817), as well as the fair copy for her publisher, are now housed in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The Bodleian acquired the papers in 2004, and they belong now to the Abinger Collection. In 2008, the Bodleian published a new edition of Frankenstein, edited by Charles E. Robinson, that contains comparisons of Mary Shelley's original text with Percy Shelley's additions and interventions alongside.

Frankenstein and the Monster

=================

The Creature

=================

Although the Creature was described in later works as a composite of whole body parts grafted together from cadavers and reanimated by the use of electricity, this description is not consistent with Shelley's work; both the use of electricity and the cobbled-together image of Frankenstein's monster were more the result of James Whale's popular 1931 film adaptation of the story and other early motion-picture works based on the creature. The impact of James Whale's adaptation is noteworthy enough that in a 2025 publication of Frankenstein, the introduction by Jeanette Winterson erroneously references the use of a massive jolt of electricity to imbue life in the creature. In Shelley's original work, Victor Frankenstein discovers a previously unknown but elemental principle of life, and that insight allows him to develop a method to imbue vitality into inanimate matter, though the exact nature of the process is left ambiguous. After a great deal of hesitation in exercising this power, Frankenstein spends two years painstakingly constructing the Creature's body (one anatomical feature at a time, from raw materials supplied by "the dissecting room and the slaughter-house"), which he then brings to life using his unspecified process.

Frankenstein does not give him a name. Instead, Frankenstein's creation is referred to by words such as "wretch", "monster", "creature", "demon", "devil", "fiend", and "it". When Frankenstein converses with the creature, he addresses him as "vile insect", "abhorred monster", "fiend", "wretched devil", and "abhorred devil".

In the novel, the creature is compared to Adam, the first man in the Garden of Eden. The monster also compares himself with the fallen angel. Speaking to Frankenstein, the monster says "I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel". That angel would be Lucifer (meaning "light-bringer") in Milton's Paradise Lost, which the monster has read. Adam is also referred to in the epigraph of the 1818 edition:

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay

To mould Me man? Did I solicit thee

From darkness to promote me?

Some have posited the creature as a composite of Percy Shelley and Thomas Paine. If the creature's hatred for Victor and his desire to raise a child mirror Percy's filial rebelliousness and his longing to adopt children, his desire to do good and his persecution can be said to echo Paine's utopian visions and fate in England.

The Creature has often been mistakenly called Frankenstein. In 1908, one author said "It is strange to note how well-nigh universally the term 'Frankenstein' is misused, even by intelligent people, as describing some hideous monster." Edith Wharton's The Reef (1916) describes an unruly child as an "infant Frankenstein". David Lindsay's "The Bridal Ornament", published in The Rover, 12 June 1844, mentioned "the maker of poor Frankenstein." After the release of Whale's cinematic Frankenstein, the public at large began speaking of the Creature itself as "Frankenstein". This misnomer continued with the successful sequel Bride of Frankenstein (1935), as well as in film titles such as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

Origin of Victor Frankenstein's name

=================

Mary Shelley maintained that she derived the name Frankenstein from a dream-vision. This claim has since been disputed and debated by scholars that have suggested alternative sources for Shelley's inspiration. The German name Frankenstein means "stone of the Franks", and is associated with various places in Germany, including Frankenstein Castle (Burg Frankenstein) in Darmstadt, Hesse, and Frankenstein Castle in Frankenstein, a village in the Palatinate. There is also a castle called Frankenstein in Bad Salzungen, Thuringia, and a municipality called Frankenstein in Saxony. The town of Frankenstein in Silesia (now Ząbkowice, Poland) was the site of a scandal involving gravediggers in 1606, and this has been suggested as an inspiration to the author. Finally, the name is borne by the aristocratic House of Franckenstein from Franconia.

Radu Florescu argued that Mary and Percy Shelley visited Frankenstein Castle near Darmstadt in 1814, where alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel had experimented with human bodies, and reasoned that Mary suppressed mention of her visit to maintain her public claim of originality. A literary essay by A.J. Day supports Florescu's position that Mary Shelley knew of and visited Frankenstein Castle before writing her debut novel. Day includes details of an alleged description of the Frankenstein castle in Mary Shelley's "lost journals". However, according to Jörg Heléne, Day's and Florescu's claims cannot be verified.