Frankenstein, once condemned, is now hailed as a Gothic masterpiece

It is easy to find some echo of this tragedy in the novel Shelley began writing the following year. That was Frankenstein, the story of scientist Victor Frankenstein who brings to life a dead body only to wrestle with the horrific repercussions of his experiment with playing God. Once critically condemned as “perhaps the foulest toadstool that has yet sprung up from the reeking dunghill of the present times”, it is now hailed as a Gothic masterpiece. It’s certainly one which has kept film makers busy since the dawn of cinema. In fact the story - while often bastardised to the extent that some of us mistakenly think Frankenstein is the creature not the creator - has never really lost its appeal and now the National Theatre is putting on a stage version, with Oscar-winning film director Danny Boyle at the helm and Jonny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch alternating in the roles of Frankenstein and the creature. Playwright Nick Dear, who has adapted Shelley’s book, has a theory as to why, almost 200 years on, we are still so intrigued by its ideas.

Frankenstein, once condemned, is now hailed as a Gothic masterpiece

“I think it’s a creation myth for the science age,” he says. “Don’t forget that most of Mary Shelley’s intellectual ideas came from the radical politics and philosophy of the time, where the great central concept was that God no longer controls everything. That’s primarily what the novel says; humans take control and God’s power is relegated. We actually make the universe for good or ill. “In Frankenstein’s case it’s for ill and most of the great technological advances that we’ve made have brought with them concomitant disasters, so I think it’s a great and powerful emblem for our techno­logical society. We create things we can’t really control.” It’s a mark of our continued interest in the story (as well as the big names attached to this production) that the run is practically sold out. But for as long as we’re fascinated by Frankenstein, the question that will continually surface is, as Shelley put it, “how I, then a young girl, came to think of so very hideous an idea”.

The author famously attempted to answer the question in a preface in 1831, not least because several critics suspected her husband, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, was the true author. But her explanation ­provides only part of the picture. The idea, as she explained it, came to her in 1816 when she was staying at Lake Geneva in Switzerland, surrounded by the elemental landscape of the French Alps and while in the exhilarating company of her future husband and his fellow Romantic poet, Lord Byron. It was a summer characterised by great lightning storms and in these unsettled conditions Byron, a lover of haunting tales, charged his guests each to come up with a ghost story. Shelley declared she had no inspiration but a few nights later had what she describes as a “waking dream”.

“I saw the 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, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.” She added that she was possessed and haunted by the dream and knew that “what terrified me will terrify others”. There is no reason to doubt this is how Shelley conceived Frankenstein but it’s also true that she had experienced plenty which might have fed her dark imagination. She was the daughter of two famous radicals, feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and philosopher William Godwin, and she had a knowledge of such contemporary scientific theories as galvanism, the sparking of life through electricity.

It’s not such a leap to suggest that the novel’s preoccupation with tragic births can be traced to Shelley’s ex­perience of motherhood (only one of her four children lived beyond infancy) and to her own birth. Her mother died in feverish agony 11 days after having her. Could Shelley have viewed herself as a destructive creation, much like her creature? Shelley’s biographer Mir­anda Seymour suggests other reasons why she might have identified with her much-maligned invention. When Shelley’s father married a woman his daughter detested, it is likely she was made to feel inferior by her stepmother Jane Clairmont, who already had a daughter, Claire. “Frankenstein’s creature represents the child who needs the nurturing love of a parent and is denied it by a ‘parent’ who wants a pretty child,” she says. “Judgment is passed on his appearance in a way that it might have been on Mary herself by her stepmother, comparing her to ‘pretty’ Claire, her stepsister.”

Seymour adds that: “The creature’s violence could be an unconscious representation of the fierce temper of which there are hints in Mary herself. She was sent away to Scotland as a child, possibly because she was too tempestuous a presence.” Shelley remained in Scotland for almost three years and it was here she saw the whalers and gained inspiration for the boat which picks up the wretched Frankenstein as he flees his creature among the icebergs and glaciers. When Shelley returned to her father’s home, she would have found more mat­erial. Her father had moved the family to a dingy house near London’s Smithfield market where Mary could hear the screaming of slaughtered animals as well as the bell of St Sepulchre which rang out every time a ­condemned criminal from Newgate Prison passed by. She would have known that the corpses were destined for scientific experiments.