"Hail to thee, blithe spirit! Bird thou never wert"...and Frankenstein. What do these two have to do with each other? And why did I pick today to ask such an odd question? You may recognize the quote as the opening line of Percy Bysshe Shelley's To a Skylark, one of the most famous poems in English. Frankenstein was written by Mary Shelley. The common last name is no coincidence, Mary was married to Percy (Godwin was her maiden name). Today is 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein . When it first was issued, on 1st January 1818, it was published anonymously. Mary was only 20 at the time. It was published with a foreword by Percy Shelley, her husband, and a dedication to the philosopher William Godwin, her father. It wasn't until 1822, with the second edition, that Mary was credited as the author. She was pretty eccentric in more ways that just writing such a weird story as Frankenstein, especially in that era. According to her journal, she lost her virginity in a graveyard with Shelley when she was 17 and he was in his twenties and already married. How goth is that? The graveyard was where her mother was buried, and tradition says it happened on her grave which puts a new spin on the phrase "you'll do that over my dead body". Mary's mother actually died of puerperal fever a couple of weeks after her birth, so Mary never knew her mother (who was also called Mary). Origins of Frankenstein The story came about because Mary, Percy Shelley (and their baby son), and Claire Clairmont traveled to Geneva to spend the summer with Lord Byron. Mary would have been 18 that year. Claire was pregnant from an affair with Byron, although she was apparently also a lover of Percy. Nothing seemed to be simple in Mary's life. However, it was the year without a summer, due to a volcanic eruption, and the constant rain meant that they spent a lot of time in the house around the fire. They amused themselves with reading German ghost stories, which prompted Byron to propose that they should all come up with one. Mary eventually came up with one about corpses being re-animated that formed the basis for the novel. She wrote it down, still in Switzerland that summer, assuming it would be a short story, but it ended up as a full length novel. There is some controversy about the authorship since Mary wrote it with an unknown amount of collaboration from Percy, and the first edition was published with no author's name. It seems that today it is accepted that Percy wrote the preface, and the rest is Mary's work. The Story is Not the One You Know The story in Mary Shelley's original is not much like the later versions that you probably are familiar with based on the movies. For example, Victor Frankenstein (who is the scientist, not the "creature") doesn't have an assistant in the book (nor does any character called Igor appear). In the original 1931 movie, the assistant was called Fritz. Subsequently, he became Igor. In the book, he starts to work a second creature, in the Orkney Islands, off the North of Scotland, but abandons her when the original creature tracks him down. The story goes from Switzerland, to Germany, to England, to Scotland, to Ireland, to the North Pole where it ends. Victor dies, and the creature kills himself by drifting away on an ice floe never to be seen again. The story actually opens with Captain Walton, on the ship near the North Pole, coming across Victor barely alive. Victor then relates the story to him. Captain Walton closes out the book too, with Victor's death and the presumed death of the creature. No stitching the body together from different parts. No brain from a madman. So I can't describe the story as an early example of IP-based design, where the chip malfunctioned due to a poor choice of microprocessor. Happy New Year Breakfast Bytes will resume normal service tomorrow. Sign up for Sunday Brunch, the weekly Breakfast Bytes email.![]()
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