Frankenstein Or, the Modern Prometheus 1818: Gothic Horror Story and Science Fiction

Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus, is a literary work by the English writer Mary Shelley. Published on March 1, 1818, and framed in the tradition of the Gothic novel, the text speaks of such themes as scientific morality, the creation and destruction of life, and the daring of humanity in its relationship with God. Hence the subtitle of the work: the protagonist tries to rival God in power, as a kind of modern Prometheus who snatches the sacred fire of life from the divinity. It belongs to the science fiction genre.

During the northern summer of 1816, the year without summer, the northern hemisphere endured a long and cold "volcanic winter" due to the eruption of the Tambora volcano. During this terrible year, Mary Shelley and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley paid a visit to their friend Lord Byron who was then residing in Villa Diodati, Switzerland. After reading a German anthology of ghost stories, Byron challenged the Shelleys and their personal physician John Polidori to each compose a horror story. Of the four, only Polidori completed the story, but Mary conceived an idea: that idea was the germ of what is considered the first modern science fiction story and an excellent Gothic horror novel. A few days later she had a nightmare or dream and wrote what would become the fourth chapter of the book. He based himself on the conversations that Polidori and Percy Shelley often had about the new research on Luigi Galvani and Erasmus Darwin that dealt with the power of electricity to revive already inert bodies, discovering it with what are known as galvanic experiments.

It is also interesting to note that Byron managed to write a fragment based on the legends about vampires that he had heard during his travels through the Balkans. Polidori used this fragment to create the novel The Vampire in 1819, which is also the first literary reference to this sub-genre of terror. So, in a way, the themes of Frankenstein and the vampire were created more or less in the same circumstance.

For the final achievement of her work Mary turned to Percy for help in her grammatical errors and in the fluidity of the text in 1817, during her stay in Marlow. In 1831 Mary went so far as to rewrite the entire work, something she had been planning since 1818.

Thanks to the original manuscript found in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University it was possible to edit the original work, without the intervention of Percy Shelley, who should be credited with co-authoring the 1818 edition. Therefore we have three editions of the work: the original 1817, the modified 1818 with the help of Percy Shelley, and the rewritten 1831. The original edition is shown to be cruder and harder.

Shortly after Frankenstein there were several stories that used immortality as a plot, such as the vampire story entitled The Skeleton of the Count or The Vampire Lover, where the Count revives a dead girl using electricity. This work was made by Elizabeth Caroline Grey, according to research by Peter Haining.

Regarding the character of Dr. Frankenstein, it should be noted that one reference was the amateur scientist Andrew Crosse. Mary Shelley knew the activities of Crosse, her contemporary, through a mutual friend, the poet Robert Southey. Andrew Crosse used to experiment with corpses and electricity (at that time a barely studied energy surrounded by a halo of mystery and omnipotence).