8 - “I Sickened as I Read”: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Summary

MARY SHELLEY'S ACCOUNT OF THE GENESIS of her famous novel is now familiar to nearly every reader of English literature: the immediate occasion for the composition of Frankenstein (1818) was a literary game suggested by Lord Byron in the summer of 1816. Byron, the Shelleys, and John William Polidori were on holiday in Switzerland. During a spell of bad weather, the company amused themselves by reading “some volumes of ghost stories, translated from German into French” they had chanced upon, and Byron suggested as a further amusement a sort of literary contest in the manner of the Decameron in which each member of the company would write a ghost story. In her account of fifteen years later, the introduction to the edition of 1831, Shelley recalls that she had difficulty coming up with an idea for a story “to rival those which had excited us to the task” and that she suffered from a “blank incapability of invention” that embarrassed her. She had to reply with a “mortifying negative” to inquiries as to whether she had as yet thought of a story (SF 226). Her writer's block was overcome, she says, by a conversation between Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley about the possibility of discovering the fundamental principle of life. They speculated on the consequences of such a discovery: “Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth” (SF 227).