Mary Shelley and the Summer of 1816
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was eighteen years old when she began writing Frankenstein. She was the daughter of two celebrated radical thinkers: William Godwin, the political philosopher and author of Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Mary Wollstonecraft, whose A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) had made her one of the most discussed writers in Europe. Wollstonecraft died of puerperal fever eleven days after Mary's birth in 1797, a fact that haunted her daughter throughout her life and that resonates in the novel's repeated images of mothers lost in childbirth and creators who abandon what they bring into being.
In the summer of 1816, Mary Godwin was living in Switzerland near Lake Geneva with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom she would marry later that year after the suicide of his first wife. Their neighbours at the Villa Diodati were Lord Byron and his physician John Polidori. An unusually cold and wet summer—caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the previous year, which lowered global temperatures and produced widespread crop failure—kept the group indoors. Byron proposed that each member of the party write a ghost story. Mary struggled to find a subject until a waking vision came to her of a pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside a creature he had assembled and animated. That vision became the seed of Frankenstein. Percy Shelley encouraged her to expand the idea into a full novel, contributed the preface to the first edition, and made stylistic revisions throughout the manuscript. The novel was published anonymously in January 1818, and many early readers assumed Percy had written it.
The Scientific Moment
The novel's central premise—that a scientist might animate dead matter using the principles of electricity—was not pure fantasy in 1818. Luigi Galvani's experiments in the 1780s and 1790s had demonstrated that electrical impulses could cause the muscles of dead frogs to contract, and his nephew Giovanni Aldini publicly applied electrical current to the corpse of an executed murderer in London in 1803, producing muscular convulsions that startled observers into believing the man might be revived. These experiments were widely reported and debated. Victor's references to galvanism and to the sudden revelation that grants him the secret of life reflect genuine scientific controversy of the period, not mere invention.
The novel also engages with the natural philosophy of Humphry Davy, whose Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1812) celebrated chemistry's power to penetrate nature's deepest secrets—language that closely echoes Professor Waldman's lecture in Chapter 3. Mary Shelley read Davy's work while composing the novel. The alchemists Victor devours as a boy—Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, Albertus Magnus—were real historical figures whose writings circulated in the early modern period; by 1818 they represented a discredited tradition that modern chemistry had supposedly superseded, though the novel questions whether the new science is truly more responsible than the old.
Revolution, Reform, and the Creature's Education
The political backdrop of Frankenstein is the age of revolution. The French Revolution of 1789 had promised liberty and equality but produced the Terror, war, and eventually Napoleon. By 1818 Europe was in the conservative reaction of the post-Napoleonic settlement, and radical ideas about human perfectibility and social justice—ideas central to both William Godwin's philosophy and Percy Shelley's poetry—were under sustained attack. The creature's self-education through Volney's Ruins of Empires in Chapter 13 is directly political: Volney's book, published in 1791, surveyed the rise and fall of civilisations and attributed their ruin to tyranny and superstition. That the creature learns about human society from this particular text signals his alignment with Enlightenment radicalism and makes his subsequent exclusion from that society a pointed irony.
The De Lacey family's backstory, recounted in Chapter 14, is set against the political persecution of the revolutionary and Napoleonic era. Felix's act of helping a Turkish merchant escape a French death sentence, and the family's subsequent ruin and exile, reflects real patterns of political imprisonment and confiscation that characterised the period. Shelley does not name specific historical events, but the atmosphere of arbitrary state power and the vulnerability of those who act on principle is historically grounded.
Where Shelley Simplifies or Takes Sides
The novel presents the University of Ingolstadt as a centre of cutting-edge natural philosophy, which is broadly accurate—German universities were genuine sites of scientific innovation in the late eighteenth century—but Shelley compresses and dramatises the intellectual landscape for narrative effect. The sharp contrast between the useless alchemists and the transformative modern chemists is a rhetorical simplification; in reality the boundary between occult natural philosophy and experimental science was blurred well into the eighteenth century.
Safie's mother is described in Chapter 14 as a Christian Arab who instilled in her daughter ideals of female independence that contrast with the servitude expected by her Turkish father. This portrait reflects Enlightenment stereotypes about Islamic societies rather than observed reality, and Shelley's sympathy for Safie is inseparable from a cultural condescension toward the father she defies.
Timeline of Key Real Events
- 1780s–1790s: Luigi Galvani conducts electrical experiments on frog muscles, founding the study of bioelectricity.
- 1789: The French Revolution begins; Volney publishes Ruins of Empires in 1791.
- 1797: Mary Wollstonecraft dies shortly after Mary Godwin's birth.
- 1803: Giovanni Aldini applies galvanic current to an executed corpse in London before a public audience.
- 1812: Humphry Davy publishes Elements of Chemical Philosophy.
- 1815: Mount Tambora erupts; 1816 becomes the "Year Without a Summer" across Europe and North America.
- Summer 1816: Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori gather at the Villa Diodati; Mary conceives Frankenstein.
- December 1816: Mary Godwin marries Percy Bysshe Shelley following the death of his first wife.
- January 1818: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus published anonymously in three volumes by Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor and Jones, London.