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typically blasphemous conversation! Here these young mods of the early Nineteenth Century were, titillating each other by separating the power of life from God and speculating about spaghetti coming to life like a pair of giggling eight-year-olds. The Darwin they mentioned was Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles, who in the years around 1790 wrote poems about science and evolution. The scientific experiments they discussed were the experiments of Luigi Galvani, who had made the muscles in the legs of dead frogs move through the application of electricity, the newest discovery of science.
    After this conversation, Mary went to bed, but lay awake in a twilight state, her mind racing with visions:

    When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—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. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade; that this thing, which had received such imperfect animation, would subside into dead matter; and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench for ever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes. 20

    Once again, at a crucial point in the development of SF, we have vital conception taking place within a nonordinary mental state. Mary’s creative imagination had accomplished what all her vain “thought and pondering” could not:

    Swift as light and as cheering was the idea that broke in upon me. “I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.” On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story. I began that day with the words, It was on a dreary night of November, making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream. 21

    Like lightning, the solution to the problem of plausible transcendence had broken in upon Mary. It was the power of science that would bring horror to life. She hardly says more than this in her story, but it is enough.
    We all know some version of Mary’s story from the many Frankenstein movies, which are the offspring of Nineteenth Century stage plays. But all these Frankensteins were revised and refined, altered for dramatic effect, updated for the sake of plausibility. They are not Mary’s story as she wrote it. Her Frankenstein was an early Nineteenth Century story, written in the context of the times.
    Inasmuch as it is removed into the past and evokes horror, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is in the Gothic tradition. But it is far less Gothic than its popular adaptations. In the original story there is no castle, no baron, no hunchbacked assistant, no dungeons, no chains, and no peasants with torches and pitchforks.
    Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is set in modern times, during the Eighteenth Century, in Walpole’s lifetime when science was making its first great impact on the world. Her central character is no nobleman with a private electrical generator and basement laboratory. Her Victor Frankenstein is merely a student of chemistry in nearby Geneva with great