The Science That Fed Frankenstein

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Byron’s personal physician, the brilliant 20-year‑old John William Polidori, regaled them with reports of the latest develop- ments in medical science. Mary’s inventive mind was peculiarly primed to grapple with both literary and scientific controversy. Her mother was the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who

had died from complications after Mary’s IMAGES TARKER/BRIDGEMAN PHOTO: birth. Her father was anarchist philoso- pher and novelist William Godwin, whose friends included chemists and pioneering electricity researchers Humphry Davy and William Nicholson, and the opium- addicted poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. These influences shaped her youthful thinking, and were encouraged by Shelley, who had dabbled in science at the Univer- sity of Oxford before being thrown out for atheism. GOTHIC DRAMA The myth of Victor Frankenstein, the crazed but idealistic young scientist who unwittingly lets loose his monstrous creation and struggles to accept responsibility, is a heady cocktail of gothic melodrama and disturbing speculation. It has proved astonishingly adaptable. The first theat- rical version, Presumption: or the Fate of Frankenstein, opened at the English Opera House in London in 1823, to huge audi- ences and scandalous publicity (“Do not take your wives, do not take your daugh- ters, do not take your families”). Mary Shelley attended, noting that “in the early performances all the ladies fainted and hubbub ensued!” There have been more than 90 dramatizations since, including the Danny Boyle-directed 2011 produc- tion at London’s National Theatre, which opened with the Creature dropping naked Mary Shelley, painted around 1840 by Richard Rothwell and housed in the National Portrait Gallery. from a huge, pulsating artificial womb. The story has also been adapted for more SCIENCE FICTION than 70 films, including James Whale’s iconic 1931 Frankenstein starring Boris Karloff. In May this year, a Frankenstein ballet was staged at the Royal Opera House The science that in London. Choreographer Liam Scarlett shrewdly analysed it as a love story: “The Creature is like an infant. He’s desperately seeking a parent or loved one to take him fed Frankenstein through the world.” Although the myth is well known, the original novel is not. There are three ver- Richard Holmes ponders the discoveries that inspired the sions. Mary Shelley began to write the first, young Mary Shelley to write her classic, 200 years ago. probably as a short story, in two notebooks at Villa Diodati, expanding it during the winter of 1816–17 in simple direct prose of great n 1816, a teenager began to compose Prometheus that summer, while at the intensity (the notebooks remained unpub- what many view as the first true work Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva in Switzer- lished until 2008). The second, lightly edited of science fiction — and unleashed one land, with her lover and future husband by her husband and more literary in manner, Iof the most subversive attacks on modern Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his friend and was published in 1818. The third was radi- science ever written. Eighteen-year-old fellow poet Lord Byron. Forced inside cally revised by Mary Shelley alone, and was Mary Godwin (as she then was) had the by stormy weather, the group spent wild published in 1831, with a fascinating new idea for Frankenstein, or The Modern evenings telling ghost stories, while introduction by her.

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With each version, the basic plot remains the same, but the tone grows darker. Frank- enstein becomes more passionate and ambi- Books in brief tious, his science becomes more sinister and misdirected (“I felt as if my soul were The Tale of the Axe: How the Neolithic Revolution Transformed grappling with a palpable enemy”) and his Britain Creature becomes more alienated and ago- David Miles Thames & Hudson (2016) nized. The 1831 introduction also contains This illuminating treatise on the Neolithic era in Britain treats the an inventive, retrospective account of the polished-stone axe that gives the age its name as a portal into storytelling competition at the villa. Mary prehistory — a revelation of material, manufacture and function. now calls the book her “hideous progeny”, Drawing on research riches from Turkey’s Çatalhöyük site to Britain’s and claims that the whole idea came to her Stonehenge, archaeologist David Miles contextualizes his core instantly, like an emotional bolt of summer chronicle of how tools, farming and metallurgy arrived in the British lightning on waking from a terrible night- Isles. As layered as the strata of an archaeological dig, this is a moving mare. “I saw — with shut eyes but acute portrait of a people at a cultural and technological tipping point. mental vision — I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phan- Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future tasm of a man stretched out, and then, on Harini Nagendra Oxford University Press India (2016) the working of some powerful engine, show With 10 million people and pell-mell development, Bengaluru signs of life, and stir (India’s Silicon Valley, also known as Bangalore) is an old city in “The early with an uneasy, half thoroughly modern flux. Urban ecologist Harini Nagendra’s study chapters evoke vital motion.” looks at its deep ecological history, colonial role as India’s garden city the mysteries The book may, and current struggle with pollution, social exclusion and residents’ of experiment, however, have increasing detachment from nature. Marshalling research from naive excitement had a more intel- satellite imaging to interviews with slum dwellers, she concludes that about electrical lectual genesis. “cities need to be ecologically as well as socially smart”, and sees kites and the The best contem- solutions in cross-city engagement of governance and civil society. fascination of porary account air pumps.” of the ghost-story competition is Water in Plain Sight: Hope for a Thirsty World Polidori’s. A medical graduate of the Univer- Judith D. Schwartz St Martin’s (2016) sity of Edinburgh, he had written his doc- Water security demands holistic, ecosystem-oriented solutions, toral thesis on sleepwalking. Before the trip, argues Judith Schwartz in this stellar global tour of innovative soil and he was commissioned by the publisher John biodiversity restoration and water harvesting. In Zimbabwe, ecologist Murray to keep a secret journal of Byron’s Allan Savory reveals how intensified grazing by wild ruminants is adventures, and in this he recorded the villa enabling 95% of rainfall to soak into the soil, and rivers to recover. In party’s speculative conversations and read- Brazil, researcher Antonio Nobre exposes how deforestation damages ing of German gothic “horror tales”. Above the Amazon’s unparallelled “forest-rain dynamics” and promotes all, he noted their wide-ranging discussions drought. And in the Texas desert, permaculturalist Markus Ottmers of fundamental scientific principles, and unveils a built “ecosystem fuelled by variants of dew”. Inspiring. whether the human body “was thought to be merely an instrument”. As Polidori put it, their brains “whizzed”. The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future SCIENCE FACT Gretchen Bakke Bloomsbury (2016) Polidori would have known about recent The US electricity grid, cultural anthropologist Gretchen Bakke experiments in electrical resurrection reminds us in this cogent study, dominates US energy but is extremely techniques by Italian physicist Giovanni vulnerable — and not just to gnawing squirrels. Nationalized and Aldini (nephew of bio-electrician Luigi predicated on power plants, it’s a poor fit with the variable, localized Galvani), and the new anatomical theories output of renewables. Bakke traces it inception by pioneers such as of German physiologists such as Johann business magnate Samuel Insull through its technological, political Friedrich Blumenbach. Also making waves and industrial evolution. Working towards a “self-healing, processor- were the fierce ‘vitalist’ debates at England’s dense ‘intelligent’ grid”, she argues, is the key to energy resilience. Royal College of Surgeons between John Abernethy and William Lawrence, about the possible existence of an electrical ‘life- And Soon I Heard a Roaring Wind: A Natural History of Moving Air force’ and the unique nature of human Bill Streever Little, Brown (2016) consciousness. These controversial ideas, As his 2009 Cold and 2013 Heat (both Little, Brown) attest, biologist alive in the great universities and research and nature writer Bill Streever is drawn to extremes. He now tackles centres of Europe, fed into Frankenstein, strong winds, from cyclones to Santa Anas, for a scientific history and especially into the moral issues that it of storms, meteorology and wind power, studded with pioneers raised about the perils of scientific interfer- such as seventeenth-century astronomer and trade-wind mapper ence with nature. Edmond Halley. A chronicle of Streever’s voyage under sail from Thus began a writing process involving Texas to Guatemala is threaded through, giving a breezy immediacy careful research over many months. to the story of how we learned to decode “moving air”. Barbara Kiser

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Shelley first mentions this in her journal education of a young scientist, evoking the for 24 July 1816. She was in Switzerland mysteries of experiment, naive excitement while walking above Chamonix towards about electrical kites and the fascination of Mont Blanc, absorbing the bleak land- air pumps. Brilliantly transformed in the scape of the Mer de Glace glacier that would 1831 edition, these become more sophis- later fill the book’s central confrontation ticated references to galvanism, the neces- between scientist and Creature. “Nothing sity of mathematics, the genius of Isaac can be more desolate than the ascent of this Newton and the intoxicating delights and mountain ... we arrived wet to the skin … I dangers of charismatic science lecturing. write my story”. Her notes on triumphantly The third narrative, dramatically held completing the first draft, “Transcribe and back until halfway through, is the Crea- correct F[rankenstein] … Finish transcrib- ture’s. Written in a wholly different stylistic ing” do not appear until April and May register, it swings violently between des- 1817, just four months before the birth of perate exclamations, poignant appeals and her third child, Clara. It is no accident that furious menacings. In the great showdown metaphors of pregnancy, birthing and par- with Frankenstein on the Mer de Glace, the entage suffuse this novel about the creation Creature begs the scientist to delve further of life. into experimentation to create a female com-

panion whom he can love. BILL COOPER/ROH 2016 BOTTOM: COLLECTION; MIDDLE: UNIVERSAL/THE KOBAL STREAMS OF INFLUENCE Faced with this terrible ethical dilemma, In the intervening period of composi- Frankenstein agrees: this second creation tion, back in England, Mary Shelley’s scene, in a secret laboratory on the Orkney TOP: ILLUSTRATION: THEODORE VON HOLST/PHOTO: THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD, 11660.E.39.; BOARD, THE BRITISH LIBRARY HOLST/PHOTO: VON THEODORE ILLUSTRATION: TOP: journal reveals an impressive reading list. Islands off northeast Scotland, is also often She absorbed the extreme accounts of overlooked. Fearful of the consequences, polar exploration in George Anson’s 1748 he destroys his female creation at the last Voyage Round the World; the distinction moment, turning the disappointed Crea- between alchemy and chemistry in Davy’s ture into a vengeful demon. So emerges 1812 Elements of Chemical Philosophy the central drama of the novel. It is not (based on his famous London lectures); merely the creation of life itself, the tech- and the new concepts of brain develop- nical ambition of science, that is called ment explored in Lawrence’s physiological into question. It is the unfolding moral lectures, given in 1816–17. In Coleridge’s choices and unforeseen ethical respon- 1798 poem Rime of the Ancient Mariner, sibilities that may come with scientific she encountered the psychology of guilt advances: artificial intelligence or artificial and abandonment; in John Milton’s 1667 life, nuclear power or nuclear weaponry, Paradise Lost, the theme of the demonic the genome sequence or invasive genetic outcast. Her husband also made clear, in editing. his anonymous preface to the 1818 edition, One added irony makes Shelley’s novel that they had discussed the scientific much greater than any film — and greater poetry of Erasmus Darwin, in The Temple indeed than its popular interpretation as of Nature, or The Origin of Society (1803). an anti-science myth. It is that in these Everything she devoured was brilliantly exchanges, paradoxically, the Creature recast as a new genre: science fiction. becomes even more expressive and human Thus, Davy’s lectures at London’s Royal than Frankenstein. He produces arias of Institution were subtly transposed, some- speech, begging for justice, understand- times almost phrase by phrase, into those of ing, compassion and human rights. In the fictional Dr Waldman, praising the work the encounter in the Alps, the Creature of contemporary scientists to young Frank- declares himself Frankenstein’s unique enstein. “These philosophers … penetrate responsibility: “I ought to be thy Adam, but into the recesses of nature, and show how she I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou works in her hiding places. They ascend into drivest from joy for no misdeed … Every the heavens; they have discovered how the Frankenstein’s monster in the book’s 1831 edition; where I see bliss, from which I alone am blood circulates, and the nature of the air we played by Boris Karloff in 1931; and in a 2016 ballet. irrevocably excluded … Misery made me breathe. They have acquired new and almost a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again unlimited powers; they can command the sister, it bookends the novel in the Arctic be virtuous.” thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, Ocean, and presents a moral enigma. Is That is the enduring youthful genius and and even mock the invisible world with its the idealistic young Frankenstein essen- imaginative generosity of Mary Shelley’s own shadows.” tially philanthropic, blindly ambitious or Frankenstein. It proclaims that the alien, From her first draft, Mary had devised simply insane? And is his Creature evil or the outcast, the rejected, finally must have a complex structure that nests three auto innocent — an ugly outcast or a persecuted claims on our humanity. And claims on our biographical narratives one within the victim longing for love? science, too. ■ other like Russian dolls, each bringing a The second autobiography is Frank- different interpretation to the Franken- enstein’s own, particularly his thrilling Richard Holmes is the author of The Age stein myth. The first, often overlooked in discovery of the deep “enticements of of Wonder, which won the 2009 Royal adaptations, is by polar explorer Robert science”. These early chapters are among Society Prize for Science Books. Walton. Told in the form of letters to his the first fictional presentations of the e-mail: [email protected]