7. Frankenstein: Horror, Humanity, and Hubris

This episode is brought to you by the Folio Society. Folio Society is a small independent publisher based in South London, owned by its employees. They revisit our favourite stories and ask how they ought to feel through design, illustration, and materials. Frankenstein, the subject of this episode is one of their carefully reimagined titles. Frankenstein lives between fire and ice. It's about what happens when ambition outruns restraint, when brilliance untethers itself from responsibility.

And two centuries on, it still has that unsettling power. From the cover to the introduction, the story is woven into every detail, deliberate, restrained, but quietly unsettling. It's Frankenstein shaped with intention, holding its chill to the very last page and never quite. You can order Frankenstein and explore the other books we keep coming back to at foliosociety.com slash the book club. That's foliosociety.com slash the book club. I suddenly beheld the figure of a man.

with superhuman speed. I perceived as the shape came nearer sight tremendous and abhorred, that it was the wretch whom I had created. His countenance bespoke bitter anguish, combined with disdain and malignity, while its unearthy ugliness rendered it almost too horrible for human eyes. But I scarcely observed this. Rage and hatred had first deprived me of utterance, and I recovered only to overwhelm him with words expressive of furious detestation and contempt.

Devil I exclaimed, do you dare approach me? And do not you fear the fierce vengeance of my arm wreaked on your miserable head? Begone, vile insect or rather, stay that I may trample you to dust. And oh that I could with extinction of your miserable existence restore those victims who you have so diabolically murdered. I expected this reception, said the demon. All men hate the wretched. How then must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things?

Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life! Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace. But if you refuse, I will glut the moor of death until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends.

So everybody that is a glimpse behind the curtain of the book club because that is how Tabby and I usually speak to each other. Uncunny. I will glut the moor of death. And also the number of times Tabby has said to me, begone vile insects. So Comply with my conditions. Exactly. So this is a tremendous scene from Mary Shelley's chilling novel Frankenstein, which was published anonymously in january eighteen eighteen.

finally confronts his monstrous creation. The terrifying creature that he has brought to life, or animated with his experiments in chemistry and in galvanic electricity. In that scene you get a sense of Victor's horror and loathing for his own creation, basically his his son, you might say. Yeah. But also the creature's slightly unusual combination of extreme violence I will glut the more of death, and reasoned arguments. He's like Tommy Fury.

Yeah, yes, that's I expected this reception. I that's sort of Roger Morley line, I think. Yeah. So Tabby, this is one of the foundational texts in the modern imagination, isn't it? It's known to millions of people who've never read the book. The idea of the scientists creating the monster is one of the most influential in all literature, in all popular culture.

It's arguably the first true science fiction novel, and at its heart is this brilliant creation, this reanimated corpse, which is Frankenstein's monster. Yeah, and it's interesting because most people think of him, the corpse, the creature, as he's known in the book, as Frankenstein. He's always given his creator's name, but actually Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein, is the mad scientist who gives him life.

But there's definitely something in that because the two of them share this strange dualistic relationship. You know, they are intertwined. They're like foils for each other, and yet they're also like two sides of the same coin. But the creature itself, I mean, it's such an iconic image. It features at every Halloween. It's the square head, the green face, the bolt. And because of that, because it's so iconic, it's been used

time and time again to represent various things. It's been used in political campaigns, to personify both political opponents and kind of massive societal concerns or dangers. It's become a byword for kind of the dangers of scientific progress. The idea of The creation destroying the creator, you know, untamed hubris, but it's also just a symbol of of horror, plain horror.

Yeah, horror and obviously a lot of that has to do with Hollywood, doesn't it? So the first film of Mary Show's Frankenstein was made in nineteen ten. And actually the monster has appeared, according to Wikipedia. Give yourself away there. Yeah, I did give myself away. But I mean I'm not gonna count them personally. No four hundred and thirty three different films. And most of those actually bear no relation to Mary Shelley's novel at all. And the most recent, the end of twenty twenty five

The Guillermo del Toro film with um Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi. I know you're hate. friend of the show. Before you give put in your little witticism, he is in fact a huge friend of the show. He hates Jacob Alordie, don't you? I'm his biggest fan. But I didn't love that film altogether. I thought it messed with the plot a bit, but it had this glorious aesthetic to it, which I think was very gothic. And obviously we'll explore later how to categorize Frankenstein as it gothic.

Or is it something else? But for me, one of the most fascinating parts of of having read Frankenstein and started doing a bit of digging on it was its writer, Mary Shelley. And she is a remarkable woman. She's something of a literary titan, a legend herself. She's very, very famous, and yet she's also been totally outshone by the monster, her own creation, ironically. Right. And her life was one which is very complex and unusual itself.

She was only eighteen years old when she wrote Frankenstein, which is extraordinary. Yeah. I mean, when I think about what I was like when I was eighteen, it makes me shudder. And she was very, very famously married, possibly one of the most famous literary marriages of all time, to Percy Shelley. Yeah. The great romantic poet. And we will dig into all of that a bit more later.

And also the wonderful story about how she wrote Frankenstein,'cause that too is it's almost mythical. But before we get to that, oh, tell us Dr. Frankenstein. What did you make of the book when you first encountered it?

So I read it at university and I was surprised. I think a lot of people who haven't read Frankenstein will be surprised by how unhorrifying it is. You know, there's a lot of um landscape, there's a lot of nature writing. You know, you feel the the weight of the late eighteenth century. of kind of romantic description and so on. It's quite pensive, isn't it? It's quite contemplative.

It's very contemplative. There's a lot of philosophizing, a lot of reflection about kind of enlightenment and romantic ideals and ideas And I didn't really exp you know, d I wasn't led to believe that. I thought it would be much more gothic novel, storms overhead, castles, uh, crumbling cellars, and people locked in dungeons. And there's actually much less of that than you might expect. If in your head there's all the Hollywood stuff. What about you, Teb?

Yeah, I had a very similar response to it. So I read it when I was a teenager. I was very, very into reading the classics at the time. I thought I would love it. I knew of it. I loved the idea of it. I did like it, but I, like you, was kind of disappointed by the fact there was no horror, that it wasn't that very romantic, it wasn't frightening, I thought, at all. So that was a bit disappointing, but I love

I think I was slightly in love with the idea of it more than the reality. But I and I I was then and I still am now. I was in awe of Mary Shelley herself. I loved her whole story. I loved her relationship with Percy Shelley. So that was a big part of it for me. And actually as as we'll discuss, I think the idea of it is to me is is still more powerful. I totally agree.

Than the narrative and the writing. I think it's the the the genius of Frankenstein as a book is the is the concepts and is the interplay of ideas rather than the propulsive narrative. And that part of it is astounding, you know, it's both a really, really impressive and thought-provoking kind of philosophical fable, but also just

The idea of it, written when it was by an eighteen year old girl, totally original then, you know, we say it wasn't frightening, but to audiences reading it then, it would have been quite frightening. It is astounding, and you can't you can't undermine that.

All right. Well let's give people a little sense of the um This astounding idea. Yeah. Of the of exactly what is in the book.'Cause I think people know there's a there's a scientist, there's a monster, but there's actually so much more than that. So we'll start off. So basically, The novel begins with a series of letters. It's an epistolary novel, which is exactly what a lot of readers in the late eighteenth century, early nineteenth century would expect.

And that definitely adds to the tension of it because you're slowly you're being drip fed. Yes, information. You know, a series of escalating events. Yeah. Yes, exactly. So we know that Mary Shelley had been reading Samuel Richardson's great eighteenth century book, Clarissa, a couple of years before she started writing this. So this is clearly this bears the imprint of her own reading. Yeah. So the letters are by a guy called Captain Walton.

And he's an English explorer and he's trying to discover the North Pole basically. And he tells his sister, you know, we have been on this great expedition and we've discovered, we've rescued this desperate sickly man who's called Victor Frankenstein. Yeah. And Victor Frankenstein in the letters tells Walton his story. This is why I'm here and this is the terrible thing that has happened to me. And basically, well, why don't you take us in, Tabby? He's from Geneva, isn't he?

Yeah, so Victor's from Geneva. He grows up in a very, very happy family. They are all extremely fond of each other. It's a mother, a father, they're quite well off. He has two brothers, a younger one called William and an adopted sister called Elizabeth, who His mother takes on as a ward, and who is basically destined to be his future bride. He is a massive, massive science nerd from a young age. He's obsessed with concepts like

the philosopher's stone. Yeah. And then as a result of that he goes and studies at the University of Ingolstadt. Yeah. Then there his scientific interests shift a bit and he becomes obsessed with discovering the secret of life and creating a perfect being So he does create this living being, doesn't he? He basically gets the dead body parts of criminals. The scene, very famous, this is the one scene from Frankenstein everybody knows. or they think they know.

They think they know because it owes more to Hollywood than to the book. Of basically Victor sewing together bits of these bodies and creating his creature. That's ha that's really what the monster is called throughout the book, the creature. The creature comes to life. Victor is horrified by it, this very famous scene. He's like, Good God, well, I thought this was gonna be beautiful. It's actually really horrible horrific.

He wanted to create a perfect, beautiful being and then from the minute he claps eyes on it, he's repulsed. Yeah, he basically has a sort of breakdown and runs away and abandons his creature. Then he goes off um to back to Geneva and he discovers that his little brother who you mentioned, William, has been murdered, and he knows almost instinctively

This is the work of this creature. Basically, I've created this being that is now gonna dog me and haunt me forever. An innocent woman is is accused of the murder and she is actually hanged for it. Yeah, because Victor actually there's only one point in the whole book that Victor admits to creating this thing because, you know, who would believe him? Anyway, as a result of this, he goes to hunt down the creature to have his vengeance on him.

And there's kind of these long passages, very, very romantic, travelling through the mountains. It's all about nature. And then he finally discovers the creature and he confronts him. And that's the scene that you and I read. so beautifully at the beginning of this episode. Right. So now we've got a story within a story within a story. So the creature is telling Victor his story and Victor is telling this to Robert Walton and Robert Walton is telling it to his sister in the letters.

Because at this point, when Victor and the creature meet, the creature then tells Victor his story and almost it's almost like a justification for why he is the way that he is. So the creature says, Look, you cast me out. You create the creature is very, very articulate. So this is a big difference with the Hollywood movies. The creature is extremely well spoken. The creature basically says, Look, I went off, you abandoned me. I became a vegetarian. Well he starts life as a vegetarian.

He wanders around the world. Yeah. Not knowing who he is, why he is, where he came from, he starts eating berries and nuts to survive. He actually is a vegetarian. Yeah. And then he comes across this kind of fairy tale like little hut. In the woods, inhabited by a very poor but very noble family, and he kind of falls in love with them a bit. And he spends his time listening to them from their shed to them talk and discuss and debate, and fairly implausibly he learns.

through this eavesdropping about the nature of the world, about the nature of philosophy, the human condition, and he learns to speak and to read. I never quite got how he learnt to read from listening. But anyway. Yeah, he sort of pieces it together'cause he also steals some books from them, doesn't he? Oh he does, he does, that's it. He learns to recognise So like Plutarch's Lives and Paradise Lost and whatnot. Yeah. All books that Mary Shelley was a massive fan of.

Exactly. So he basically goes on this sort of education course. Anyway, eventually they see him. Yeah, he decides that he's going to talk to the blind patriarch, old father of it. That's right, yes. Because he thinks he knows that he looks different from them. So he thinks well

I can earn the grandfather's kind of trust and fondness and respect if I speak to him. And then they do talk and they do get on very well, but then everyone else comes back, sees that he's a terrifying monster made of so of sewn together. Yeah, exactly. And naturally they freak out and he runs away feeling abandoned, feeling rejected once.

It's his rejection that leads him down the path of kind of violence because then it's at this point that he thinks Oh gosh my life's in in in ruins, um I've been very hard done by it's all the faults of my creator. This is in search of Victor. goes in search of Victor, murders uh Victor's brother. So this is the story that the creature tells Victor.

And then after this, he basically persuades Victor. He says, Look, I will I will behave myself if you will make me a mate. If you will make me you know, I'm Adam, and we'll get onto this later on. I would like you to make me an Eve, a female creature. Mrs. Frankenstein. Exactly, Mrs. Well, Mrs. Creature, I suppose. Creature, Mrs. Monster. Victor says he'll do this, but then Victor changes his mind, doesn't he? He thinks a terrible idea, I'm not gonna do this.

Yeah,'cause he's afraid of what they're you know, if they breed, what it'll do to the world. What it'll do to the world. And and poor behaviour from Victor I think. He dumps the body of this that he's been working on of the of the female in the sea. So the monster's like, Okay, well, all bets are off now and he murders Victor's best friend. When Victor marries his adopted sister, Elizabeth, he murders her, the creature murders her as well on the Yeah. Which is harsh.

Yeah, that seems that seems like an extreme step to take. Personally, my sympathies as as listeners will discover are slightly with the creature. I think the creature has been hard done by Tree and Victor has behaved poorly and he's he's got it coming, basically. Yeah, I don't know if you should murder her as a result, but we'll get to all that later. So Victor now says, Well, fine, I'm gonna hunt you down.

And he hunts the creature down. This is basically why they've ended up at the North Pole. Victor has tracked the creature ever further north, and this is the point at which Robert Walton finds Victor and Victor's a a sort of he's a wreck of a man. Frostbitten, depressed. Exactly. Having an existential crisis. And so then Walton continues to write letters to his sister and he says Look, what happened was actually Victor ended up dying, you know, cold, misery, exhaustion, illness.

Yeah. I like this bit. He sees a vast form Yeah. Kind of hankered over Victor's body. This is the very end of the book. And actually rather than being triumphant, the monster is the creature is Miserable. He's he's mourning Victor. He's mourning Victor. He is feeling repentant for all of the wrong that he has done, the murders he has committed.

And then, you know, mourning the loss of his father of I mean, Victor is essentially the creature's father, he goes off and he d well, he tells Walton he's gonna go off and throw himself onto a bonfire so that no one like him can ever be made again and nothing like this can ever happen again. And that's the end of the creature. The end that's the end of Walton's story and of the creature. That's the story of Victor Frankenstein and his lovable creation. Um Yeah. His pet creature.

The story behind the story is as you say, Tabby, just as good if not better. Yeah. Frankenstein herself. So this is the story of Mary Shelley. So tell all, please, Tabby, because you're a massive Mary Shelley fan. So Mary Shelley was born in London in seventeen ninety seven to William Godwin, who was a very famous radical philosopher in his own day.

and a pioneering feminist called Mary Wollstonecraft. And Mary's mother made her name by writing A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in seventeen ninety two, which kind of highlighted the secondary status of women in society, which at that time was rarely if ever acknowledged. Anyway, this earned her a lot of admiration among a certain type, a kind of the radical intelligentsia of the day, but obviously the dislike and contempt of kind of the public at large.

Both Mary Wollstonecroft and William Godwin were heavily influenced by the ideals of the French Revolution and I thought this was so interesting. She actually went to France to partake in the revolution at its at its height. And they were part of a small radical group in England, which they were called the English Jacobins. I'm a big fan of them, and this included people like Thomas Paine and William Blake. Okay.

Wow. My absolute favourite person ever. So Mary Shelley obviously grew up aware of being kind of the progeny of two extraordinary, unusual people. And she acknowledges this, which I also think is admirable because a lot of writers maybe they'd like to kind of say that they're born some kind of divine talent and innate genius, but she says

It is not singular that as the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity, I should very early in life have thought of writing. I think that's modest. I I admire that. She's very much in the shadow of her parents as she grows up, isn't she? So you mentioned Mary Wollstonecroft, she's pretty well known now as a pioneering feminist. Definitely she is, yeah. But at the time, probably better known actually was William Godwin, this sort of radical radical writer thinker.

A celebrity, he'd been a sort of dissenting minister and then he became an atheist. He wrote this very celebrated attack. Well, I say celebrated but much criticized attack on institutions like the law. governments, marriage, all of these things and he said basically they hold people in chains. This will be important for Frankenstein. Godwin thought that people were born basically good and innocent and in a state of nature and uh that they are corrupted.

They're very it's very Rousseau like. Jean Jacques Rousseau, the Genevan philosopher, who thought similarly that people are basically good and they're corrupted by society and institutions. This is what Godwin thought as well. And actually, Tabby, I see one of your notes you wrote the the telltale words, I suspect that Dominic Sandra would not care for him. And actually you misjudge me.

Because I read William Godwin's book Caleb Williams at university. It's brilliant. And it's a precursor of Frankenstein. So Caleb Williams, there's this chase where this guy, Caleb Williams the hero, has uncovered secrets about this aristocratic bloke who basically pursues him across the world. And this idea of the pursuit of the Yeah. Clearly ends up as a sort of in Frankenstein, as Victor and the creature.

Let me explain myself, because the reason I thought that you wouldn't necessarily approve of Godwin is because I know that you are, you know, you loathe hypocrites. Yeah, thanks. And there is a hypocritical portion of Godwin in that even though he decried marriage, he and Mary Wollstonecroft did eventually get married. I don't think that's necessarily hypocritical though. I think that's a bit harsh from you.

No, possibly not, but he did say he was very he was very against it. But he said it was so that you know, to make her happier because Mary was pregnant with Mary Shelley, the future Mary Shelley. Anyway, he was definitely, definitely a a brilliant, brilliant man.

And as you say, his writing and his political views would influence all of Mary Shelley's works, her whole life, not just Frankenstein. Anyway, her mother, Mary Wollstonecroft, tragically died just after Mary was born, relating to, you know, complications to do with the birth. And this left Godwin totally, totally bereft. And Mary and her half sister, who was born from a a an affair that her mother had earlier, were left to him, and he therefore got married again. To their neighbor.

To their neighbour, exactly, Mary Jane Claremont, because he thought that, you know, the girls needed some kind of motherly warmth to to raise them. And um she wooed him, she chatted him up with the famous line Is it possible that I behold the immortal Godwin? That who wouldn't fall for that? That would do it for me for sure. Yeah, it definitely definitely. So now Mary Shelley's being brought up by William Godwin, who's pretty chilly as a father actually. But he's invested in her for sure.

And cares a lot about her, but he's a very cold, unemotional man. And also this stepmother who's sort of l uh you know, a slight element of the wicked stepmother about her because Mary Shelley grows up to loathe her. But also the stepmother brings with her a daughter called Jane, who basically Mary absolutely loathes. She's the worst person ever, I don't blame Mary. Mary said of Jane, she had the faculty of making me more uncomfortable than any human being. I really like that.

So Mary, you know, she's very bookish. She reads loads of gothic novels and epistolary novels and stuff growing up, you know, as a teenager. But she's always very much in her father's shadow because her father is always trying to educate her and encourage her to be high minded and stuff. And he's also got this huge

got a contacts book of mates, you know, Samuel Taylor Colderidge and great writers and stuff, who are pitching up at their house and talking about ideas and radical views and the French Revolution and stuff. So Mary that's always going on in Mary's head. I mean it's an extraordinary environment in which to have been brought up. Some of the greatest minds of that time

spent, you know, were in that house chatting stuff. There's a wonderful story about how once when she was a little girl, she wanted to she was told to go to bed, but Samuel Taylor Coleridge was reciting um the rhyme of the ancient mariner, which is obviously really, really, really long. And um, you know, Gordon was trying to get Mary to bed and then slightly desperately Coleridge begged that she and Mary's sister were allowed to stay up to hear the rest of it, which I really liked.

So obviously all of this will have had a massive influence on Mary and her father attested to the fact that she was very, very clever. He wrote it in a letter to a friend, but he also said that she would make um castles in the clouds, which I really, really like. She'd kind of get easily distracted. And then she was singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. So there you go. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in anything she undertakes almost invincible.

So I like that. That's a really really nice sketch of how. But then he also added, My daughter is, I believe, very pretty. Yeah, a bit weird. I do, I find that slightly sinister. I mean everyone thinks that about their own daughter, don't they?

Anyway, talking about her being very pretty and also Godwin having all these friends and disciples. So when she's in her early to mid teens, it's not exactly clear when, probably about eighteen, twelve, so she would be fourteen or fifteen. She first sees a bloke who's turned up, he's in his l very late teens, probably nineteen or twenty, who's a huge fan of her father, who is himself a poet.

who is himself very sort of hot headed and excitable and romantic, and who is himself very radical, so suffused with the idealism of the French Revolution. And this is a young man called Percy Bysh Shelley, the poet. Yeah. And he's crucially for Godwin, he's rich, isn't he? So he's going to lend Godwin loads of money, which is great for Godwin. Yeah. He's well born and rich. He's going to inherit um a baronacy which will make him even richer. Yeah.

And basically he and Mary end up falling in love, which is a slight problem, A because Mary's very young, so when they definitely fall in love, she's sixteen. Mm. The other big problem, he's also married, isn't he? He's married a woman called Harriet. Who how old is she? She's Nineteen or so. Yeah. So this is Paul from Percy. Yeah, especially as Harriet would later go on to drown herself in the serpentine when she was only twenty. Because of this affair, right?

Yeah, because m Percy left her. You know, by the end of June she'd bas so think of such there's such a short time now that's passed between Mary and Percy's meeting. Mm. Percy Shelley had has essentially abandoned her even by then. He spent most of his time at the Godwin's house. visiting daily and the two of them Mary then Godwin and Percy Shelley would go on

searing hot dates to uh a graveyard, the graveyard where her mother was buried to um whisper sweet nothings over her grave. And they were always accompanied by their famous third whale, Mary's loathed stepsister, Jane. Right. So Jane's now disgra uh she's now calling herself Claire very confusingly. Yeah, she does go on to to rename herself Claire. Finally, on the twenty-eighth of July in eighteen fourteen, Mary and Percy.

finally eloped to the continent. Obviously once more accompanied by Jane, now at this point, Claire. And there's always been some speculation that because Jane was Claire was always there, she and Percy were also lovers, but there's absolutely no evidence to back that up. Right. The Percy was carrying on with both of them.

Anyway, a bit like that scene in the famous scene in The Graduate when you get to the end of the movie and Dustin Hoffman's character and kind of his love interest are sitting on the bus and they've run away from a wedding. They kind of sit there and they suddenly look kind of a bit depressed and bleak because they've done the shocking thing. The elopement, this tour of Europe, turns out to be a total disaster. The three of them are penniless, they travel from place to place, friendless.

It's just a disaster. It's the worst kind of honeymoon ever, although crucially they are not married because Percy Shelley is still married. at this point And they end up coming back to England. They've got massive money problems. Yeah, they're in debt. Yeah, they're in huge debt. Mary has a child. She has Percy Shelley's child, a girl, but the child dies after only a few days. This is a tragic part of Mary's life as well. Yeah, she has a lot of bad luck, right?

Yeah, of the four children that she has, only one of them survives. And there's this very touching dream that she recounts in her journal about when this first baby dies, and she dreams that she's sitting in front of the fire holding it and the baby dies, and then she rubs its corpse. And the heat of the flames brings it back to life. And there's something kind of very human about it. Yeah, yeah. But the idea of reanimating somebody who's dead, I mean you

Why that would be on her mind. And actually talking of that, let's get on to the writing of the book. Yeah, iconic. So basically, um they go back to Europe, don't they? She has a son called William at the beginning of eighteen sixteen. And they after that decide they'll go back to Europe. They go to Geneva in Switzerland. And they meet up with Shelley's another of Shelley's great heroes, another romantic poet, Lord Byron. Yeah.

who is staying at Villa Diodati on the shores of the lake. An extra little uh frisson here, because Claire, formerly Jane, is now having an affair with Byron. So There's a real sort of menage ah cat kind of yeah kind of feel to this. It's all you would expect of the romantic poet.

Is. They're on the lake, but it's actually fun at first. They're going having parties outside, they're going swimming and whatever. But eighteen sixteen, notoriously, is the year without a summer. There's been a volcanic eruption in the Dutch East Indies, as they were then were.

That means there's basically no summer, it's very wet and cold and stormy, and so actually as the as the weeks pass they spend an awful lot of them cooped up inside in this villa and they've got nothing to do, and this is the context for the writing of Frankenstein.

Yeah, it's absolutely wonderful. So at night they've been sitting around reading loads of German ghost stories. And one evening, Byron and I think this is a brilliant idea, Byron says, Well to pass the time, let's all try to write our own ghost story. So they will have a go. Shelley, Percy Shelley starts by writing a story about himself, and that fizzles out. Right. Byron then starts telling a story about a vampire, which his friend and doctor, John Polidori, who's also there.

later adapts and turns into a short story called The Vampire. And then Mary is desperate to, and I quote, make it to write a tale that makes the reader dread to look around, to curdle the blood and quicken the beatings of the heart. But nothing comes to her. She she can't think of anything. And every day they ask her, Where's your story, Mary? And she's like, Oh, I still don't have one.

She's got it, isn't she?'Cause she literally says, you know, they would say, Have you thought of a story? And each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative because she wants something really good and she doesn't want to just phone it in. Yeah. She wants to be equals with them as well, I think. Of course. She's young and they're much older and she's a woman and she doesn't want to be patronised by these frankly very anno I find them very annoying. I don't.

Romantic poets. But at one point she's listening to uh Percy and Byron and they're whittering on about science and about the principles of life. And basically they say we we'll talk about this in the second half, about the scientific ideas behind Frankenstein. They say, you know, what where does life come from? How can you animate it? Could it be something to do with electricity? Could you with galvanic experiments, could you manufacture a creature and and give it life somehow?

And and she listens to them talking about this and then she goes to bed and she basically has a waking nightmare, doesn't she? She can't sleep, so it's not like she's asleep. It's but but sh her mind is is running amok and she has this vision. Tell us about the vision. Oh, it's wonderful. She sees this

pale she calls it a 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. So you can see right there from the start that she sees this as something that's dangerous. Yeah. Which is the opposite from Byron and Shelley, who are excited by this idea. The idea of mankind being able to engineer life.

And she also writes, 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. So she's frightened by it, by this vision that she has of a a pale student. Creating a terrifying monster. And she says, you know, she thinks that the student would be terrified of what he has created, totally understandably.

Because the student it's really interesting. Byron and Shelley, you know, among the romantic poets, it was fashionable to affect a kind of atheism and a kind of cynicism and whatnot. But, you know, the teenage Mary Shelley is saying to mock God, to play God.

Gosh, that would be overwhelming and terrifying and awful and you would be appalled by the consequences of what you would done. And she says the artist would surely and it's interesting'cause she calls it the artist rather than the sort of the scientist. the artist would rush away from his odious handiwork and she imagines that the artist

asleep, and then the curtains of his bedside opening and these yellow, watery but speculative eyes of the creature staring down at him. And this is the inspiration for the story. I love that origin story and it's actually true. You know, there are so many myths around about how people write mm legendary books, but it's actually true. She records it in her own journal. It's it's brilliant.

So she says, swift as light and as cheering was the idea that broke in upon me. I have found it. What terrified me will terrify others, and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow. So there you go. She's got the ghost story. To tell Byron, Shelley and the rest of them.

Yeah, so she tells them the story, doesn't she? She starts writing it down. Yeah. And she starts with the words It was a dreary night of November. Yeah. Which actually that's basically she uses that exact phrase in the book. And at first she thinks, Oh, this will just be a short story but actually they say, God, what a brilliant story this is. This is incredible And Shelley says, Oh, I think you should turn this into a novel. You know, there's definitely a book in this and this is what she does.

And so when they go back to England, she's working on the book and in eighteen eighteen Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus again we'll talk about this Prometheus aspect. Crucial subtitles. This is published anonymously. She doesn't tell anybody that she's done it. And actually do you know what? The reviews aren't very good, are they? People don't like it.

I know. They actually a lot of them reminded me of the reviews for Wuthering Heights, which we did a couple of weeks ago. They c they kind of say that it's almost immoral. They basically say it's kind of it's fiendish and and outrageous. Yeah. Th there's one wonderful review. By a guy called William Beckford. Gothic writer.

Yeah, a gothic writer. So I mean that's quite telling in itself. He doesn't acknowledge this as kind of a a gothic work, but he writes this is perhaps the foulest toadstool that has yet sprung up from the reeking dunghill of the present times. Wow. So ouch. I've had I've had worse reviews than that though, to be fair.

But on the plus side, Walter Scott is actually quite positive about it and he's a huge inspiration for Mary as he is to, you know, Emily Bronte, similar kind of genre. Anyway, the key takeaway from all the re these reviews is They don't know that Mary Shelley has written it, so they assume that it must have been written by either her kind of legendary father, this famous radical, or her husband, another famous radical.

Yeah, Percy. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And then it's only in the edition, the second edition that comes out in eighteen twenty three, that they realise it was written by a woman and they're absolutely shocked by this, and this shockingly patronizing line is written in Blackwoods. For a man it was excellent, but for a woman it was wonderful. Ugh Blackwood's let itself down there. Yeah. So coming from a woman is really good. Wow. Well done you, Mary. Well done you.

But you see there's a lot of controversy at the time about and speculation about whether or not Mary Shelley actually wrote it or, you know, it was kind of her hand was guided by the two main men in her life. And I think actually you still see this even now. I actually saw somebody writing about this on social media actually about a week ago saying you know, obviously d Percy Shelley wrote Frankenstein. It's obviously nonsense that uh Mary wrote it. I mean, this is rubbish.

Yeah, we're gonna put the record straight once and for all. Totally. So in her we have the evidence of her journals. We have the evidence of Byron writing about it. Byron says it was a wonderful work for a girl of nineteen. Now that is patronizing and condescending. But at least Byron is admitting that she wrote it, not his mate. Byron, who is often quite rude about women, that is high praise indeed.

But also I've been to in the in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, they have the manuscripts of Frankenstein. They have the handwritten manuscript and I've seen it because I was filmed with it for a series about science fiction on the BBC about ten years ago. If you look at the manuscript, the handwritten, you can see Shelley's suggestions, his notes, and you can see where Mary has ignored them, and you can see all the stuff written in her own hand.

Yeah, Shelley definitely advised her, helped her all the way through the process, but it is her work and it is her words and it is her writing. But there is one way in which Percy Shelley was had a massive impact upon Frankenstein.

is in the character of Victor Frankenstein himself because there's a lot to suggest that Percy Shelley was kind of the original model for Frankenstein. A lot of the characters that Percy Shelley writes about in his own writing and poetry, they are themselves kind of Icarus. characters. They fly too close to the sun. They're overreaching. They're really ambitious. They're really invested in the idea of themselves as kind of creative forces and the creative powers within them.

this is very poor from Percy Shelley, but when he was younger and a child, he would call himself Victory. Nice. Always. Still do deep down. Victory Sandbrook. Sandbrook the Conqueror. Yeah, I like it. It sounds right. But this is what Mary Shelley was originally gonna call Victor Frankenstein. Oh, right, she was gonna call him Victory.

Victory. Yeah, she was gonna call him Victory. Like Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein, Percy Shelley was obsessed with the natural world as all romantic poets are. And he had this habit Which is kind of ironic given that he later drowned in a boat. But he had this habit of lying at the bottom of boats and looking up at at the clouds and it would kind of make him think and give him peace. And that's exactly what V Victor Frankenstein does in Frankenstein.

And also Percy was uh I mean, I remember w um doing a thing on The Rest is History, another podcast. I mean who who's ever heard of that podcast? Um which I I can remember your fai first episode, Tabby, uh when you were producing, was about boarding schools and how people would pursue Shelley around Eton. Shouting the Shelly, the Shelley, they'd go on Shelley hunts and try to beat him up. And one reason was that he was too interested in science, which they thought was weird.

He was a science nerd, which people wouldn't think when they think about romantic poets, because they're often kind of juxtaposed, aren't they? Science and romanticism. Yeah, they're seen as as as polar opposites. But actually the romantics were very interested in science. Shelley, when he was at Eton and then at Oxford, he'd be always like have like batteries coming out of his pockets or something, been doing an electric experiment or whatever. Yeah, what a funster he was.

But the weird thing is a friend of his wrote an account of the kind of experiments they used to conduct. And they bear a weird resemblance to the way that the creature's birth and creation is portrayed in the movies that have been done of Frankenstein. Because it's all about kind of big jars full of water and electricity and batteries and stuff.

You know, he charged the friend writes, he charged a battery of several large jars, labouring with vast energy and discoursing with increasing vehemence of the marvellous powers of electricity. She speaks about thunder and lightning and how channeling this thunder and lightning into the water or whatever it is would create something marvellous. And that is so That looks exactly how you imagine the creature's birth, isn't it? Also captures the curiosity, the vision, the ambition, the excitement.

of science and indeed of anybody interested in the kind of the world of the intellect in the seventeen nineties and eighteen hundreds, you know, this sense that you're kind of breaking through frontiers of understanding and and leading mankind into this n wonderful new age. And that vision is so central to Victor Frankenstein's sense of what he's doing when he makes the creep.

It totally, totally isn't uh but ironically bears very little resemblance to that scene. The idea of jars, lightning, thunder bears very little resemblance to the creature's birth in Frankenstein i itself. And we will we will touch on that later. So we've probably had enough about Mary and Percy,'cause I think what listeners really want is they want um Victor Frankenstein and his monster, no? Yeah.

Right, so after the break we will discuss the question that haunts the producers of this show, which one is the real monster? We'll find out after the break.

Welcome back to the book club. Now Dominic at the break you were telling us all how hurt you had been by um some of the comparisons that we made in the first half this episode. So going forwards I will restrain from comparing you two Victor Frankenstein. Yeah, it was very very hurtful to be. Oh I know you are practically crying to our producers. But I have one final request to make of you in the guise of Victor Frankenstein. Yeah. Would you please use your scientific powers?

To bring the man, the myth, the legend that is Victor Frankenstein and his monstrous creation back to life. Well this is brilliant bad notes. It is. So let's start actually let's start not with Victor, but counterintuitively with his monster. Because be on to be honest, when people think about Frankenstein, it's the monster that they actually think of first, isn't it? So he is born In the lab.

So if you see in the films you can imagine the electricity fizzing, rather like a repartee in this episode. Yeah, just as animated. Is animated exactly. And actually, in the book, there is no electricity fizzing. It is much a sort of darker, more intimate scene. And actually. Tabby, why don't you read remind listeners of this of this scene because it's the sort of physicality of it, but also the shock of Victor when he sees the monster. It's one of the most memorable scenes in the book.

But we should also say that we don't see anything to do with the practicalities involved in his creation. Everything all of that happens off stage. There's no allusion to vast jars full of green liquid or anything like that. We come in from the moment that he the creature is born. So he says

How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe? Or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form. His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful Beautiful Great God His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath, his hair was of a lustrous black and flowing, his teeth of pearly whiteness, but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes.

that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips. Yeah, so he is chos I mean Victor thought the creature was going to be beautiful, he chose his features accordingly. But a really important point is something that Victor and indeed Mary Shelley hammer home again and again. He is utterly repulsive. We're left in no doubt whatsoever that this creature is absolutely repugnant. You see it and you are

repelled. So when when he comes into the boat, towards the end of the book, Captain Walton says He was gigantic in stature, yet distorted and uncouth in proportions. I mean, he's not unlike the orcs in The Lord of the Rings, in Tolkien's vision, which is again of a kind of distorted, perverted humanity. That's what the creature is. And yet, one of the key things about the creature that I think the Hollywood Frankenstein obviously completely misses is this. He is articulate, he's sensitive.

He's very well spoken, he's thoughtful, he's reflective. Curious. You know, Tabby, you're a you're actually a big fan of the creature, aren't you? I am. Am, I'm a massive fan of the creature. I see myself in him, frankly. Oh wow. Because he is very, very intelligent. He learns at a ridiculously fast rate. He is contemplative.

He is fiercely curious. He's actually very gentle at the beginning of his life. He's really, really thoughtful and and and rational actually. And The seven central chapters of Frankenstein, which are the the creature telling his story, they're kind of the moral heart.

of the book. They provide the moral underpinning to the whole story. And interestingly, that is the bit that is always cut out of movie adaptations because I think people find it a bit boring. But also because it's the part of the novel that humanizes.

the monster, it turns him into kind of a thinking, feeling being. Because the thing is, though he looks like a monster, through learning, through eavesdropping on this family, he develops the emotions and the moral compass A human and he feels like like a human Yes, he absolutely does.

So I think that by putting those chapters on screen, you don't get the hammer horror monster, short cropped hair, bolts that maybe you're going for. You get like a a you know, a really Interesting. Sympathetic. Yeah. you do, absolutely you do. I mean I think when you in in those chapters you get Mary Shelley's a lot of her philosophical vision, a lot of her vision for the character, what she's actually trying to say.

So when he wait he he's fled the lab, his creator he doesn't know who his creator is or why his creator has abandoned him. Or why he's there. Like we all kind of slightly want to know why we exist. Of course. It's it's what inspires people to kind of look to God or whatever it may be. But he has no idea. Yeah, this is getting to the humanity of the creature, to his essential humanity. The creature wakes in the forest.

Like man in the Garden of Eden. He looks around with wonder, he goes in search of berries, he's naked and he finds a cloak and he um clothes himself. He is delighted by what he hears. He tries to imitate the singing of the birds and so on. So sweet. It's childlike actually. It is childlike, exactly. He's like a child, you know, awaking into life. And then he sees this family, the people who live in the cottage, the cottages.

and he he w he thinks they're wonderful and he wants to emulate them. But this very moving scene, very sad scene, he looks in a pool And he starts back in horror. I was unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror because he's so loathsome and horrible. Basically it's like what I feel like when I look in the mirror, Tabby. I know. He's got my fragile self esteem. You are nothing but a sensitive Frankenstein's monster. Thank you.

But that also echoes the Garden of Eden, you know, when Adam and Eve become self aware and they try to cover themselves with fig leaves. Exactly, and he curses the self awareness that comes with knowledge. And he says at one point, Oh that I had forever remained in my native wood, nor known nor felt beyond the sensations of hunger, thirst and heat. In other words The more I know about myself and the world, the unhappier I become.

And as we said, that's that's very, very Rousseau, a Genevan philosopher. So no coincidence that um large swathes of this book are set in Geneva, because he idealises the innocence, you know, innocence and nature.

He believed that humans were, as you said, born good, born innocent, but society and institutions corrupt us. And Rousseau was a massive influence on Mary's father, Godwin. He also believed that institutions crafted by human society were destructive forces and and and ruined the human heart, the human soul. So these chapters are just they're just pure Rousseau, a state of innocence, the Garden of Eden, the more the monster learns, the more corrupted he becomes.

Yeah. I mean the monster has begun life as basically a member of the Green Party. He's eaten berries, he's been kind, he's uh It's he's he's got very poor self esteem, all of those kinds of things that we associate with members of the Green Party. And um and then he becomes evil. So he he he he he crosses the political spectrum and he becomes Yeah, he becomes a member of reform. Oh we've Tabby, you've can't believe that. You've thrown away.

She's she's literally th to our reform voting listeners, I mean I you know, distance myself from Toby's remarks. And I apologize to our three Green Party listeners. Right. I mean we've got three members who are three listeners who are all members of the Green Party. What a coincidence that fifty percent of our audience would be Green Party members. Anyway, he becomes evil. He does become corrupted and he because he becomes a killer of women and children, I mean he's literally a child murderer.

That is definitely definitely not something that you can defend the creature on. He springs to violence. so quickly and so instinctively. And actually one of the things that I really came away from reading this again was was the sensation of of those those hands around a neck.

You know, his strangulation of his victims is is terrible and terrifying. But having said that, he is not just a pantomime villain. He's conflicted, he's full of remorse for the murders that he commits, and he says of himself that he is a wretch. And that's definitely not what you get in kind of the classic horror films in which he plays a big part. And that makes him pitiable. Yeah, he's got a self loathing. The eternal outcast, yeah.

Yeah, one of the most moving things about the creature actually is that is a very human feeling, which is his feeling of loneliness, of isolation. Frankenstein's monster doesn't even have a name, which is sad. No. No, exactly. The fact that they're from Causing Frankenstein, I mean that's the ultimate that would be gutting for the monster.

Oh of course it would. I mean he he it's like he doesn't have an identity. His identity is only his creator and his creator doesn't even want him. So because of all that and in spite of his appalling violence, I did really pity the monster at the end of it all. Yeah.

And the monster obviously does have a forerunner. He has a model who has a very famous name. So the title page of the book is a has a quotation from John Milton's seventeenth century epic poem, Paradise Lost. One of my favourite poems ever, I love it. Well, really. Mm. I'm very impressed. I've never read I've never read The Hold of Paradise Lost. So Yeah, we should. Okay. So the quotation runs as follows Did I request the maker from my clay to mould me man?

Did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me? And basically this is Adam, the first man, talking to God in the Garden of Eden, saying, Did I ask you to make me from clay? Did I ask you to awaken me from darkness? Now, Mary, you know, she loved Paradise Lost, like you, Tebby. She read it twice in eighteen fifteen and eighteen sixteen.

John Milton had actually stayed at the villa, the Villa de Adarte, on the banks of Lake Geneva, where they were staying when she w comes up with the story, and the theme of Adam and God runs right through the book. The monster himself alludes to it at one point So he steals Paradise Lost from the Cottages, he reads it, and he says, I am basically a worse version of Adam. Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence.

But then he says the difference between me and Adam, Adam was created by God as perfect, happy and prosperous, guarded by the especial care of his creator. But I am wretched, helpless and alone. I have no creator looking after me, as as Adam did. Yeah, so I mean in that he's kind of like a Manichaean Adam who is i is a different version of the Adam in the Bible, but he

he chastises his maker for making him rather than kind of being being grateful. Yeah. But there are other points in the novel where he's compared to another character in Paradise Lost and that is Satan. He actually refers to himself time and time again as a fiend. And Satan is the angel in Paradise Lost, the former angel who falls from heaven because he rebels and therefore lives out his tire his life in hell. He lives in hell. And the creature actually says

Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition, for often like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me. And that ambiguity is undoubtedly central to the book. You know, is the creature an innocent Adam or a cruel and vindictive or certainly rebellious Satan. You know, is he the first man, Adam, which would make him like us, or is he the devil, essentially?

agree, this is the ambiguity that has been so enduring about Frankenstein. To me, it it's actually m in some ways the deeper meaning of the story that it's not just a story about man playing God, which would be, you know, a man pretending to be God and the creature as some terrible aberration. I think the idea that the creature is us and Victor is God or Victor, you know, th that this the story is

man's horror and rage and resentment at his own creator. And that's the idea that so many science fiction you know, let's think of Blade Runner, for example. Yeah. Blade Runner, the replicants, their their fury at their own creator, you know, who's made them and put them in the world and they have a shelf life and which will and they will expire. Their horror at their condition clearly echoes the creature's feelings of incomprehension and alienation and abandonment and whatnot from Victor.

Interesting though, I it occurs to me that Mary Shelley must have a very cynical view then of humanity in the human heart. Because it implies that man corrupts man. And, you know, the longer that we live among humans, the kind of fouler and more degenerate we become.

But in a way that's her father and his ideas about institutions corrupting us and whatnot. Yeah. I mean, these radicals, they had this sort of idealised view of human innocence, but at the same time they believed that the world was full of you know, they're obsessed with all the things that were wrong with the world. And all the inequality and all the injustice and whatnot and all the things that we had that the the prison we have built for ourselves, I guess.

Yeah, but it's interesting then because if the monster, therefore, is man, is us in the story, what then does that make? Victor. Is he God or is he emblematic of human institutions? So I mean I think this is a good point for us to talk a little bit about Victor, because He's his name is probably the most famous part of this novel, but people very rarely know much about him. They just think of the monster. Yeah, we don't even get a description of him, right?

physical description, he's just described as having wild eyes, which is why I think Oscar Isaac was a very, very good choice for him physically. But also the way that he played him as very controlling and proud and kind of bent on his own selfish ends. Because Victor Frankenstein in the novel, he's not entirely likable. He's incredibly ambitious. He's a bit of a glory seek seeker. His name, Victor, points to that.

his creature describes him as self devoted. And I think he is. I think he's a very selfish man. He never considers for a moment that his creation might do bad rather than entirely doing good. You know, he thinks of himself as a bit of a saviour. And he doesn't

think much about what he has done. Think much about how his creature has destroyed his family. Yes, he feels very guilty about what his creature does, but he doesn't stay with his family and kind of mourn with them. He's just constantly running off to chase the creature again. Well the creature lives in his head rent free, right? I mean he's he's obsessed with the creature. But he is he's definitely brave.

He is loving and I think those elements of him, this pathos, makes him kind of a tragic figure. A bit like a figure from Aeschylus or something like that, rather than entirely evil. There's a s element of the Greek tragedy about him, undone by his own by his own hubris, I guess. Yeah.

But there is I mean you talk about Victor and his family, there's one relationship that he completely neglects, and that's the paternal relationship, because he never feels any responsibility towards his creature. He never shows the creature any mercy or compassion He's maddened with hatred. He talks about his abhorrence of the creature. He says, you know, my hatred and revenge burst all bounds and moderation. Victor feels guilt about creating the creature, but he doesn't feel any obligation.

to the creature. And and actually you could argue Victor is its father. Yeah. And Victor should embrace it. I mean that's what the creature wants, right? I mean if Victor is God, people always refer you know, Christians always refer to God as as the father. I think one of the things that Mary Shelley is saying, she's not just warning of kind of unchecked ambition or the depth of

that science might plunder in the world. I think she's also saying that if we do, if humanity does use science to create, we have to be shepherds of our creation. You know, we are responsible for it. And Victor neglects his creation entirely from the moment of its birth. I mean that famous scene where they can they they confront each other on the glacier for the first time and the the the creature is telling Victor his story.

The the creature says to Victor, I'm I'm asking basically I'm asking you for recognition and affection. You, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature. Do your duty towards me and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. And then Victor rejects him and says, You know, I I'm not interested in you. You're horrible. You're a terrible person, whatever. And then I think actually quite moving lines, the the creature says

O Frankenstein, remember I am thy creature. I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, blah blah blah blah blah. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous. And that basically is the the creature's story in a nutshell. He's desperate for a father. He says, I was born good, but I've been driven to evil. I've been made vengeful. Please show me a a crumb of affection and then I'll be a good person. And Victor can never bring himself to do it.

But the book isn't just about the responsibility of the creator, it's also about hubris and humility. So this introduces another major theme, which is the consequences of man playing God and kind of unleashing his creation upon the world, a f you know, terrible force of destruction.

Yeah, and this is made very obvious in the subtitle, which is the modern Prometheus. So in many ways this is one of the real keys to the book, the idea of Prometheus. Now Tabby, you're the classicist. So Prometheus, you're all over Prometheus, I assume. Yeah, love it, love it. So there are two Prometheus myths. There's the one that's more famous from Greek mythology, in which the Titan Prometheus steals fire from the Olympian gods and gives it to man who he has modelled out of clay.

Both Byron and Shelley loved this this version of it and turned Prometheus into a romantic hero. But then there's another later edition of the story from Ovid, and we know that Mary had been reading Metamorphoses in eighteen fifteen. And this is a Prometheus who kind of manipulates men into life from clay. So in this sense, Frankenstein's a very Promethean figure. He's a maker of men.

And while Prometheus in in that version of the story does it with magic, Victor obviously uses science, which is obviously music to your ears, isn't it, Donald? Yes, exactly. Love some. I absolutely love science. I think actually this book is a warning about what happens if you take an unhealthy interest in science. That's a comfort to me'cause I take very little interest in science.

Yeah, great. Well this is one of the I mean this is this is why we're a good team because neither of us l knows anything about science. that way. So Victor is a boy, like Percy Shelley, obsessed with chemistry, all of this kind of thing, wants to learn the secrets of heaven and earth. He's very clearly reflecting the mood of the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century, the Enlightenment, this idea of of curiosity, of progress and so on.

And, you know, they would have these arguments. People would have these arguments. They're so common at the time. People would have them publicly in the newspapers or whatever. What is life? What makes life different from death? Does it have anything to do with electricity? Is there some sort of spark that animates the body like an and like an electric current? And you can see all of that reflected in the space.

Yeah, you totally can and we know that Mary Shelley was fascinated by these arguments'cause she would often attend lectures on them. Anyway, there were all kinds of experiments going on in the 1780s and nineties and eighteen hundreds to see if you could bring a corpse back to life. You know, it's it's so interesting that the minute that human science advanced Enough. The first question to spring into people's minds was life, animation. Like what gave us all life?

Anyway, so they started digging into this a bit and they tried to see if you could bring corpses back to life using electricity, which had recently been discovered. And you can see why this would interest someone like Mary Shelley, who'd been afflicted by death her whole life. And then remember again the dream that she had about warmth bringing her baby back to life. So in seventeen eighty one, a s there's

I never thought I'd be giving a science lecture. In seventeen eighty one, an Italian surgeon was dissecting a frog and next to some big static electricity machine. Did that machine work? Do you want to explain how the static electricity machine works?

I could, but I don't feel like it because I've got a lot to say about, you know, books and stuff. So just park it. I'll tell you after. Thanks. Yeah, I'll tell you after. Anyway, so because this scalpel was near this big, you know, electric machine.

When he started when he put it on the frog's leg, the frog's leg started twitching. Right. And, you know, this was huge. And then his nephew, a guy called Aldini, took it a whole lot further, a whole lot further in eighteen oh one. And what he would do is he would tour Europe and he would publicly try to animate the corpses of murderers or criminals using electricity.

And this is so Victor Frankenstein'cause if you read the reports that Aldini wrote about these experiments, and I did read a little bit of one, there's this kind of um creepy the same creepy relish in his the way he describes these very gory experiments as as Victor has, the fanatical, you know, scientific twinkle. But then one day he inserted metal rods into the jaw of one criminal and the corpse, the jaw of the corpse began to quiver

and contort and its left eye actually opened. This scene is done brilliantly in Guima del Toro's new movie, I have to say. So there we have it. In real life, the origin of of the experiment that Victor Frankenstein conducts to bring his monster to life. But obviously it's much, much more literal. In the book, we never get anything this direct.

Yeah, because we don't really see all this. I have to say, that would be kind of interesting to see. Oh totally it was. Yeah, I mean I know it sounds a bit gory and a bit macabre, but I would be in I mean, I'm sorry, I'm giving myself away here, but I would actually pay good money to see people.

Um It's interesting though. I it made me wonder, do you think there are still kind of scientific experiments going on in the world where people scientists are desperately trying to do this?'Cause it's funny that we started at the very beginning, you know, huge strides in science that's bring people back to life. But you don't hear a lot about that these days when we've come a whole lot further. I don't know, it just made me wonder.

No, you very rarely read about scientists trying to bring bring back people by shoving metal rods into their job. I feel like in that sense we've digress we've um regressed. We've gone backwards as well.

Well, anyway, I guess the point of that m for Mary Shelley though that's so interesting is that she thinks all of this is so dangerous that she is not as enthused about it as so many people are, because for her Victor's enthusiasm for this and his thirst for knowledge and his thirst for kind of mastery over the laws of nature Wondering nature. Yeah.

Yeah, she finds this abhorrent and she thinks this will have terrible consequences both for Victor and for society, for humanity at large. And in that sense Yeah, again, you can see how this foreshadows so many of the warnings that you get in modern contemporary science fiction, that our hubris, our enthusiasm for science is what will destroy us. And also obsession.

thoughtless obsession is is a massive red flag in the book. But as you mentioned earlier, thinking about the the influence of this on on later fiction, not even just science fiction, you can see a lot of this in Lord of the Rings, can't you? Kind of The wizard. Saruman plundering Middle Earth. Yeah, completely. So I was thinking there's a bit at the beginning of the book when um Robert Walton so even Robert Walton, the guy who's telling us the story, the sort of sea captain.

He says to Victor, you know, I'm really desperate to find the North Pole and he says, How gladly I would sacrifice my fortune, my existence, my every hope for the furtherance of my enterprise. And he says life and death is nothing to me because what I want is the knowledge, the dominion I should acquire and transmit over the elemental foes of our race, the elemental foes being the laws of nature and whatnot.

And that is the kind of thing that you can imagine one of Tolkien's villains, Sauron, Sauron, whatever, or any mad scientist in any number of films Saying the ba the the threat here is not so much, I think, science per se. No. It's arrogance. It's the thirst for mastery and for knowledge at any cost. Which is again is a very Tolkienian, if that's the word, which it isn't. Uh sort of theme.

But you know what else it reminded me of, having recently watched the finale? It reminded me of Stranger Things. But not just- Yeah, totally it did. You know, mad scientists. plundering the laws of nature and as a result unleashing unforeseen dark terrors on the world. It's also very Jurassic Park. It's very the Terminator.

And because Victor's initial um intention in creating the monster, so he says, is to find cures for diseases. Just as for Aldini, Aldini said that his the reason that he was conducting his experiments was to save people from drowning, to bring people from drowning back to life. But people even say that of AI today, you know, they say it'll change the world. Not necessarily for the better, but it's all okay because it will revolutionize medicine and that will save lives. So that you've just gotta

It's extraordinary what Mary Shelley was doing when she wrote this. The precedent that she set, like these ideas were totally original when she was writing this book. Yeah, it's what makes it so foundational. It's what makes it, I think, without any question, one of the two or three foundational science fiction texts. Because so much of science fiction science fiction tends to ask what if.

But science fiction also, you know, a huge theme of it is what we do with our power and our knowledge and and how far will we go and how much will we destroy in the sort of pursuit of progress. Yeah. And Frankenstein and the idea of creating life. I mean, so a any story about a sentient robot or a computer that comes to life. Or a creation or some you know, advance that humanity has made that ends up having disastrous consequences. They all at some level I think come back to this.

book written by this effectively by this teenager on a miserable holiday with the rain pouring down outside to basically try and entertain her slightly annoying mate.

Yeah, and her ghastly stepsister looking on. But it is it is not just a trailblazing science fiction novel, it's also more retro than that. because it's also undoubtedly a romantic novel. You know, it's full of scenes of nature, the bliss, the sublime bliss of nature, the healing force of nature. That's very, very romantic. And also

the romantic movement believed that you could shock it's all about emotion. It's a very emotional book. But they believed that you could shock emotion out of people and that was important. And some of the more chilling scenes in the novel do just that. You know, the idea of

this terrifying monster with its hands round a small boy's neck, the idea of animating life. But it's not just that, it's also very much a gothic novel. And you mentioned how Mary Shelley was reading a lot of gothic fiction. She read it all throughout her life, but also around the time that she was writing Frankenstein. Books like The Mysteries of Adolfo, The Monk, these are the gothic novels of the period. Yeah. The canonical gothic novels.

Exactly. And this book is just it's full of the gothic, full of suspense. full of storms and sudden appearances, isolated, gloomy settings, graveyards, charnel houses, the psychological torment of Frankenstein and well sort of pretty much all the characters in the book. The the relentless pursuit by Frankenstein of his creature.

This is all very, very gothic. But having said that, it is far more pensive, it is far more ideological, it's far more philosophical than most gothic novels are. It's not driven by plot, it's driven more by ideas.

Yeah, I think that's definitely true. It's driven more by ideas than by plots. And I think it's the blend of those three things that makes it so remarkable as a book. Yeah. That is clearly a romantic element to it. There is clearly this sort of supernatural, haunted, um yeah, there's a lot of stuff in graveyards and all of They always

Yeah, that draws so the films often do draw on the gothic element very heavily. But I think it it's the to me, the most enduring elements is definitely the science the more philosophical science fiction one. And that's why I think it lives on. Those gothic books that you mentioned, The Mistress of Adolfo or The Monk. Nobody reads them now and the m I'm guessing the majority of our listeners have never really heard of them.

Yeah. Frankenstein if it were merely a gothic novel would be forgotten, but I think it's the ideas and the science fiction element that have ensured its kind of place in the popular imagination. The idea of you know what are the moral costs of of the pursuit of knowledge, what responsibility do we have to our creations? The idea of the creator who is undone by his own hubris and whatnot, all of that kind of stuff. I think that's why it lives on.

And the twisted progeny as well. I mean, you can see that in anything from Edward the Scissor Hands to ex Mackinac. But I do also think it's that. It's the science fiction element of it, but wedded to kind of the soulfulness, the tender soulfulness of the romantic of the romantics. I love that. Some of my favourite passages in Frankenstein are the kind of reflections on the natural world, but then wedded to this dark.

you know, shocking creator scientific element. And I think that's why you can also see its influence in books like Never Let Me Go, which is so thoughtful and a and emotive and sort of move Yeah, melancholy. There's a melancholy to it, right? Yeah, it's there's a huge melancholy to it, which I think is very romantic. But then, you know, wedded to the fact that Never Let Me Go is about creatures. Kind of But they're searching for their creator too, aren't they?

suffering as a result of their creators. Yeah, exactly.

So we should wrap up by talking very quickly about Mary Shelley. So Percy drowned in a boating accident, didn't he, in eighteen twenty two. And that basically was that was a trauma from which in many ways she never really recovered. She was devastated by that.

Yeah, she kept his ashes, she famously kept his calcified heart and she preserved that for the rest of her life and she never remarried. She had opportunities to, but she never did. And she spent a lot of her the rest of her life kind of protecting his legacy in curating and editing his his works, but sh he did leave her nearly penniless, with only one surviving child, a guy called Percy Florence Shelley.

She was a bit of an outcast when she returned to England in 1823 because of her unorthodox marriage, because of her infamous parents, all of this. And Percy's father, a baronet, refused to meet Mary personally and would only provide her with very small allowance, hinged on the fact that she wouldn't write anything that at all controversial or immodest.

So she lived very carefully, she wrote very carefully so as not to outrage him. And a lot of this was in part to protect her son's inheritance, which again I think is admirable. Finally, when her son, Percy Florence Shelley, inherited Percy Shelley's baronessy in 1844, or Percy Shelley's father's baronessy in 1844. Her financial woes were slightly eased, but she suffered from illness.

and depression all of her life and then she died in eighteen fifty one at the age of fifty three, probably people now think from a brain tumour. So pretty tragic end. Yeah. But she did write for the rest of her life independently. But never anything to match this extraordinary work that she produced, you know. I mean and as we've said

Just an extraordinary thing for a teenage girl basically to have written. Under the weird pressure of these extremely well known writers sort of looking at her expectantly and saying, Well, come on, where's your ghost story? And then she comes out with this. Extraordinary. All right.

So how did she do? I mean this is their I mean, who cares what Byron and Shelley thought? What everyone wants to know is what Tabby and I think. Yeah. So Tabby, we always mark these things out of um appropri in it with an appropriate index. You have chosen to mark this out of So it's murderous reanimated corpses out of ten. How many murderous reanimated corpses out of ten do you give Mary Shelley's masterwork?

So chuffed with that scale that I've chosen. Anyway, I am gonna give it shockingly a seven because the I know it is a bit harsh. Ugh, yeah. But the uh I'm kind of I'm fused with remorse like Victor Frankenstein and his creature. But the relentless self flagellation of just all of the characters, from from Victor to the creature to Victor's family, it got a little bit exhausting after a while. I know that was very of its time, but nevertheless

I did find it a bit exhausting. The endless chasing theme I found a little bit boring. The fact that none of the characters are massively th fleshed out, they're kind of more ideals of people. They're all representations of different philosophical stances. But having said that, the fact that she makes you able to hate and sympathise with both Victor and his creature throughout the novel is an extraordinary achievement.

and I love the the the nature passages and just this the sheer like this idea it's just mind blowing. Sometimes I would catch myself when I was reading it and just be staggered by the fact that she came up with this. Never mind being a woman at eighteen years old. The fact that the But still only seven out of ten. Yeah, all right. Don't hammer it home. So I'm actually gonna give it eight out of ten.

But even for you. So so I tell you what, I think some people reading this for the first time may find bits of it dr do drag a bit. I think the stuff with the cottages is feels very eighteenth century. I like that bit. perhaps a little bit too slow and and pensive to use your word. I find the chases and the murders, yeah, they are a little bit repetitive. I think some of the prose is a little bit I'm not a massive fan of that overwrought sort of capital romantic style.

I think it was slightly more sort of bare than some of the Books of that time. Yeah, I th I mean I guess by the standards of books of the late eighteenth century. less anguish Yes, maybe. So I'm I'm marking it mar mainly actually on the idea, the foundate the central idea, which I think is so foundational. I like all the stuff about Paradise Lost and Prometheus. And I think

There's no question Frankenstein is one of the core books of the Western canon, I think so much of our popular culture will be unthinkable without it. So although I think it is surprisingly unscary and unhorrifying as a book, I do think everybody should read it. Very good. And with that we um put the corpse to bed. You can put the corpse to bed. What corpses are we disinterring in the weeks to come, Tabby? What's next week's corpse?

Next week we will be doing The Northern Lights, so The Golden Compass in the US by Philip Pullman, then Normal People by Sally Rooney, and then East of Eden by John Steinbeck, with lots more exciting corpsey treats to follow after that. That is exciting. So on that bombshell, uh thank you everybody for listening. Uh we'll see you next week. And thank you, Tabby. Bye bye.