On the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s gothic horror, a new edition discusses its roots in experiments with electricity on the dead

It is one of the most famous novels of all time, often cited as the first work of science fiction, with a genesis almost as well known as its terrifying central character.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus was published 200 years ago in 1818, when she was just 21. It was the result of a challenge laid down in 1816 by Lord Byron, when Shelley and her lover – later her husband – Byron’s fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley were holidaying at Lake Geneva in Switzerland.

The party had hoped for good weather, but the eruption of a volcano in the East Indies in 1815, the greatest event of its kind in recorded history, had ushered in three years of bone-chilling cold that killed crops and cast a shadow across Europe. As they huddled for warmth around a fire one night, Byron suggested each of them should write a horror story.

For days Shelley suffered writer’s block until she came up with the idea of a scientist who reanimated a creature stitched together from body parts, only to be horrified by his success. Some believe Shelley was inspired by a trip to Germany, where she is thought to have learned the legend of Frankenstein Castle and one of its 17th-century inhabitants, an alchemist called Johann Conrad Dippel, who was rumoured to have exhumed bodies for experimentation.

But it now appears Shelley’s true source of inspiration for Victor Frankenstein’s monster was considerably closer to home. In a foreword to a new edition of the classic, to be published by Oxford University Press next month, Nick Groom, of Exeter University, sometimes referred to as the “Prof of Goth”, suggests it was her husband’s fascination with galvanism – chemically generated electricity – that sparked her imagination.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mary Shelley. Photograph: Getty Images

Percy Shelley, one of Britain’s most cherished Romantic poets and author of the celebrated sonnet Ozymandias, was fascinated by science, in particular the creation of electricity. “He was very excited by galvanic apparatus,” Groom explained. “His sister, Helen, would recall that he would, as she put it, ‘practise electricity upon us’. He used to make all the family sit around the dining room table holding hands, and he’d turn up with some brown paper, a bottle and a wire and they’d all get electrocuted.”

On one occasion Percy even threatened to electrocute the son of his scout at Oxford University.

Mary and Percy enjoyed a symbiotic working relationship. She corrected his proofs and he helped edit Frankenstein. But Groom is clear that the book was, contrary to what some have argued, Mary’s creation. “The work is by her and should be attributed to her.”

Sent down in 1811 from Oxford for co-authoring a pamphlet on atheism, Percy attended anatomy classes for a term at St Bartholomew’s hospital in London.. “One of the things she would have got from talking to her husband about laboratories was that they were really filthy places,” Groom said. “The cadavers would be in a state of advanced putrefaction when they arrived. These were not antiseptic places full of chaps in white coats. They were unpleasant. The word filthy turns up a lot in Frankenstein. There was something really disreputable about medical science, which Mary Shelley is fascinated in.”

She would have been aware of notorious public experiments involving galvanism. “There was a particularly chilling one in London in 1803 when galvanism was used on the body of an executed criminal,” Groom said. “The very first thing that happened was that the corpse opened its eyes. A very Frankenstein moment.”

At the time Mary was writing, the rights of animals had become a concern for many of the intelligentsia. “The being that Victor creates knows he’s not human but still believes that he should have rights,” Groom said. “Part of the conundrum of the novel is, do you afford comparable rights to non-human sentient creatures?”

Two centuries on, the novel continues to shape contemporary thinking, Groom suggested, posing questions about matters such as artificial intelligence and genetic modification.

But Mary’s astonishing foresight has yet to be fully recognised.

“Her reputation has been overtaken by the films, which have oversimplified these questions in ways that don’t really reflect the sophistication of her novel,” Groom said. “Boris Karloff’s monster has none of the subtlety that the being has in the novel. He’s not a zombie, he’s intelligent and sentient.

“People need to see this as a novel for today. It’s very much entangled with the pressing questions of humanity, which still concern us.”