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Mary Shelley and the Birth of ‘Frankenstein’ (1818)
A warning to modernity
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“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
‘Frankenstein’ is partly a masked biography written as a horror story. Even at her birth, we see the tragedy and suffering that would impregnate the very story fated to make Mary Shelley famous.
Mary Shelley was born at 20 minutes to midnight on 30 August 1797, at the top of a house in the Polygon, Somers Town, an aspirational address before the arrival of the railway, after which it became a disreputable London slum. The baby was healthy but her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft required medical attention. She would die 11 days later from complications. The incompetent male ‘midwife’ sent for by Mary’s father, William Godwin, had passed on an infection by not simply washing his hands.
A few have seen the visceral description given by Mary Shelley in her book describing the birth of the Monster — guttering candles, the rain pattering at a window, a lifeless creature lying at a man’s feet — as being details prompted more from a deathbed scene like her own mother’s than from any ‘phantasm’ that she may have dreamt about at the Via Diodati after being dared to write a ‘ghost story’ by Byron.