The teenage Mary Shelley wrote much of the book in a boarding house in the city as she endured scandal and family crises

In December 1816, a teenager wrote to her lover from a lodging house in Bath that she had finished the fourth chapter of her book, “a very long one and I think you would like it”.

This year marks the bicentenary of the publication of that book, Frankenstein – famous in its day and ever since, interpreted in art, film, comics, ballet and music. The almost forgotten link between its creation and the city of Bath will be marked for the first time by a plaque to be unveiled on Tuesday.

Mary Godwin – child of the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who died 10 days after her daughter’s birth, and the radical writer and campaigner William Godwin – wrote much of the book during months living in Bath while her life was scarred by traumatic events.

Her father had refused to see her since she eloped with Percy Shelley – accompanied by her stepsister Claire Clairmont – though he continued to borrow money from Shelley. While in Bath, she learned of the suicide in Swansea of her half-sister Fanny. She also supported the discreet birth, in lodgings five minutes from hers, of Claire’s child by Lord Byron, and her own marriage to Shelley was made possible by the suicide of his pregnant first wife.



The Lake Geneva link with the tale of Frankenstein giving life to a monster patched together from corpses is renowned. In a later bestselling edition, Mary told of events in June 1816 when she, Shelley, Byron and Dr Polidori scared one another into fits reading and telling ghost stories in a villa by the lake. She never mentioned Bath, where she wrote a large part of her story.

“It’s almost as if she spent those five months here as an object of scandal, without wanting anyone to know where she was – and the secret has been kept for 200 years,” said Sheila Hannon, the founder of the Show of Strength theatre company, who leads Mary Shelley walks through the city. “How she managed to get anything written at all is astonishing, but perhaps the book was her salvation. Her time in Bath is a very dark story, and she deserves to be celebrated.”

Hannon lives in Bristol, where Fanny, who may also have been in love with Shelley and felt bitterly excluded when both her sisters went off with him, stayed over on her last tragic journey west. Hannon had first visited the Lake Geneva sites, and then learned in astonishment of the connections on her own doorstep.

The plaque will be outside the famous Pump Room and Roman baths beside a nondescript trapdoor in the flagstoned pavement. It covers the only surviving part of the print shop with rented rooms upstairs where Mary stayed. It was demolished in the 19th century leaving only the cellar, now in use as an electricity substation.



Frankenstein’s first edition of 500 copies was published anonymously in January 1818, soon followed by much longer print runs. Mrs Piozzi – formerly Hester Thrale, Dr Johnson’s best friend until she scandalised society by marrying her music teacher – lived minutes from Mary’s lodgings. She wrote to a friend: “Lord bless me! That hideous tale Frankenstein was done, it seems, by Miss Godwin.”

However, the campaign to celebrate Mary’s time in Bath, backed by Hannon and members of the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution – where curator Matt Williams believes the Shelleys, avid followers of scientific developments, must have attended lectures – has been a long one. The plaque will be unveiled by Christopher Frayling, an expert on horror films and author of a recent study of Frankenstein, who, with the late Angela Carter, tried and failed to get a plaque 20 years ago.