The Modern Prometheus

Mary Godwin Shelley was only 18 years old when she gave birth two months prematurely. The child was a girl whose life span lasted only days. Acute depression set in, as the melancholy Mary began to have nightmares... dark visions of her dead daughter, pangs of guilt for not being able to protect her. One night, Mary experienced a frightening dream of warming her dead child above a fire as she roughly massaged it back to life. This was her mind replaying the scenario of the birth, looking for some way in which she could have revived the baby. It was maddening to Shelley, and so she grew an obsession of the premise of cheating death and the dream of creating life.

The grandfather of her husband Percy died and bequeathed a great fortune to the couple, and Percy saw that it was an excellent time to take his wife on holiday and away from her ghosts. They travelled to Torquay, then to Bishopsgate (where Mary would birth a son), and afterward to Geneva to visit their friend Lord Byron. Byron's estate was always lavish in mid-year, but the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora halfway across the world had plunged Europe into a deadly ashen winter and frigid summer. Unable to enjoy themselves in the world outside, the party of writers retired indoors and read a book of German ghost stories over wine (perhaps even hearing the local graverobbing legends of Johann Dippel, an alchemist who had once lived at the nearby Burg Frankenstein in Darmstadt) . That evening, at the challenge of Lord Byron, Mary set out to write her own ghost story, and a vision came unto her which was a mix of the alchemical fringe sciences of the day and the raw sorrow, guilt and hope that had plagued her dreams.

"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."

She called this work "The Modern Prometheus" after a line from an Immanuel Kant pamphlet about Ben Franklin's experiments with galvanism. In short time it would be published under the title "Frankenstein." It was unfavorably criticized for being "a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity", yet it was a rapid financial and literary success.

"The beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart."

~~~ Victor Frankenstein moments after witnessing his revolting creation.