Frankenstein

In 1817 Mary Shelley published a travelogue, detailing a six-week tour of Europe with her husband Percy. Whilst on that tour they visited Castle Frankenstein, on the Rhine, and heard disturbing tales of an occupant who had lived at the castle 100 years before and experimented with human corpses, trying to bring them back to life with alchemy. English society was also familiar with experiments carried out by Italian scientist Giovanni Aldini in the first years of the 1800s, attempting to restore life to corpses with electricity. They resulted in horrifying animations as the muscles contracted over the bones. The novel owes a great deal to the scientific progress and discoveries about electricity at the time.

The genre of Gothic fiction to which Frankenstein belongs is a curious blend of romance and horror, which began in the late half of the 18th century. The Gothic writers played with the readers’ imaginations by introducing grotesque and disturbing elements to their stories. They were often set in Medieval castles, hence the term ‘Gothic’ and incorporated dungeons, torture devices, the supernatural and so on.