After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - The Truth About Frankenstein

Episode Date: July 10, 2025

Against a time of radical change, a gothic masterpiece was written by the teenage Mary Shelley.Published in 1818, Frankenstein takes us into a dark world where man and monster meet in mutual torment. A world of raw, animalistic fear.How was this story influenced by the tragedies in Mary Shelley's own life, and the early 19th century obsessions with playing God?Edited by Tomos Delargy. Produced by Stuart Beckwith. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Please vote for us for Listeners' Choice at the British Podcast Awards! Follow this link, and don’t forget to confirm the email. Thank you!You can now watch After Dark on Youtube! www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

Hello everyone, it's us, your hosts Maddie Pelling and Anthony Delaney. But before we begin the show, we want to ask for a few seconds of your time. If you're enjoying After Dark and we love you if you are, we would love you just a little bit more if you could vote for us in the Listener's Choice category at the British Podcast Awards. So go to the show notes now, click the link and just then search for After Dark. Fill in your name and your email and don't forget to confirm. They will send you an email you need to confirm. The whole process probably takes about 30 seconds.

If you've already voted, we are so, so grateful. If you haven't, stop what you are doing right now. Vote for us before you enjoy this show. Hello and welcome back to After Dark. I'm Anthony. And I'm Maddie. And in today's episode, we are exploring the history behind a Gothic and science fiction classic.

We've been waiting to do this for quite some time. It is, of course, Frankenstein. And we begin, as such tales so often do, on a East Indian island of Sumbawa, the volcano Mount Tambora erupted, sending vast plumes of molten ash into the atmosphere. So immense was the explosion that it was heard by British East India Company men hundreds of miles away. Thousands died. In the months that followed, an unseasonal chill spread over the Northern Hemisphere

in what became known as the year without a summer. Crops failed, snow fell in July, few, if any, knew its cause. It was in these strange, uncanny months of 1816 that a group of young, brilliant minds gathered in a villa on the shores of Lake Geneva. Under enduringly black and menacing skies, the stage was set for the birth of a Gothic masterpiece. Confined indoors by relentless storms, Lord Byron, his physician and friend John Polidori, the poet Percy Bish Shelley, and the young woman he had brought with him, Mary Godwin, passed the time telling old ghost stories.

But as the night wore on, their supply of clinking chains and spectral figures began to run a little bit dry. It was then that Byron had an idea. Each guest, he declared, must write a chilling tale of their own. What followed would shape the course of horror and science fiction forever. As each retired to their own quarters to write, Mary, fresh from England in a childhood of loss and radical education, slipped into a waking dream. What she found in the dark, swirling corners of her mind was a monster for the modern age, and a man who would haunt readers for the next two hundred years, a scientist who dared to play God and the tragic creature he created.

The result was Frankenstein, a novel born not just of imagination, but of contemporary debate around death, humanity and raw animalistic fear. Under flickering candlelight and the scratch of her quill, Mary conjured a world where man and monster met in mutual torment. One that frightened even her. As she wrote in these pages, there is something at work in my soul which I do not understand. This is After Dark, and this is the truth about Frankenstein. So Maddy and I are recording this episode after a long time of wanting to, actually, but we're recording it when there is an amber heat warning out for the weekend ahead. And it's June, it's the end of June, the very end of June, and Maddy was just describing July there and I was kind of thinking to myself, what I wouldn't give for a sprinkling of snow in July.

But that is that is our Gothic disposition. And this is not, as you may well know, when it comes to After Dark, this is not just going to be a discussion about the book Frankenstein. It's going to be about an awful lot more about the strange and dark world that birthed it, of course, and the woman who wrote it. And that is, of course, Mary Godwin, aka Mary Shelley. But before we dive into what Mary was doing, how this book came about, how this monster, question mark, was created, let's talk a little bit about the historical context. So let's start in the year of publication, Maddie, 1818. Tell us what's going on. I think this must be one of my favourite eras in history. You know, a few episodes ago, you said to me that if I was a decade, I'd be the 1790s. And by the way, listeners are desperate to know what

your decade is. So we'll get to that in a second. But I think the 1790s through to about 1820 is my sweet spot. And I know you're not one for this period particularly. You like an earlier period, don't you? I do love this too. But yeah, it's not where if I could time travel back, it's not where I'd land myself. What is your decade of choice then? If you were to personify a decade in time. 1720s, babe. Without skipping a beat.

That's me. I know my answer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why the 1720s? I don't know. It's that cusp thing between 17th and 18th century. Cause remember for my, even though I did 18th century for my PhD, my MA is in early modern 17th century. He's an imposter. So it's like, yeah, I don't know. That 1720s thing seems to be, if we talk about the long 17th century and the long 18th century, it seems to sit very comfortably in between both of them. So yeah, I'd be 1720s.

The nice overlapping spot. Lovely. Okay. Yeah. So taking us back to 1818 then, because it's completely superior. So we have George III still on the throne, but he is incapacitated. If you want to know more about him, you should listen to our episode on the final days of George III, actually. He's such a fascinating figure, but he is incapacitated due to mental and physical illness, and his son, the Prince of Wales,

is now ruling as the Prince Regent. This is an era that is incredibly rich in terms of art, in terms of literature. We have, of course, Jane Austen writing during this period, and in fact, Jane Austen's famous Gothic novel, which is a satirical take on the Gothic novels of the late 18th century, is published in 1818, the same year as Frankenstein. What a year to be a goth adjacent girl, I tell you. Goth adjacent. The excitement. Goth adjacent. Dark in my heart, slightly more colourful on my exterior. But I'm not even colourful on my exterior. But goth adjacent.

You once described yourself, I think, as dressing as like a depressed monk. Possibly. That sounds accurate. I also go for lesbian nun. Oh, yeah. Greg James, who presents a morning breakfast show, who I think is a brilliant, brilliant broadcaster, but he describes something along the lines of like sad boy summer or something like that. I'm paraphrasing. And it's very that for me. I'm like, oh God, okay, let's endure this for the next however many months that we must endure it.

It's I love darkness. Well, I interpret darkness as coziness, but that's fine. But so this this is right up my gig in terms of that. This is comforting. Although you might not have felt that comforted if you're alive in this era. So we have the Napoleonic Wars going on. They end in 1815 at the Battle of Waterloo. And this is a world therefore that has changed. The British Empire, the French Empire has changed shape during this global conflict. And there is real genuine fear in Britain leading up to 1815, fear of invasion, fear of revolution at home, fear of plots.

Talking of the 1790s, the French and the Irish try to team up at one point against the British. There's a real sense that the world is closing in on Britain, that there's huge threat. You just have to think of all those militia officers in any Jane Austen novel and their presence, which is so romantic and sexy in the books. Their presence in these small villages and towns across England certainly was really a cause for anxiety in that moment. We also have, leading into 1818, 1819, we have these socially radical movements beginning and we are also doing an episode on the Luddites and the sort of slightly earlier period to this in the 1810s leading into the 1810s. And there's huge sort of radicalism, there's political unrest.

And of course, in 1819, there's the Peterloo massacre in Manchester. That's the kind of context that we're in. Obviously, we have the romantic poets as well. We've got Wordsworth, we've got Coleridge, we've got Keats. We've got Walter Scott beginning to rise up and there's a romanticisation of the English countryside, of British history, of what's seen as a simpler, nobler time before industrialisation as William Blake has the dark satanic mills have ruined the landscape and taken over everyone's kind of psychological view of their world where they sit within it. It's a period of change. It's a period of experimentation, scientifically and artistically. What's not to love? It's just the most exciting period. I do like this as well.

Yeah. And it's, it's like kind of move out of like, the strictures and the routines and the boundaries of enlightenment. This kind of taxonomic idea of like, here is the world, here are the categories, we have to put people and things into the categories and that's it. Now we understand everything. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's before the Victorian age. I always think the Victorians ruined everything, which is potentially a little bit unfair. I think it's unfounded, but I agree.

Yeah, it's a kind of the very beginning two decades of the 19th century are this kind of unbuttoned, wild, bodice ripping, sexy, violent, dangerous, exciting time when everything is changing and everything is to play for. The old world is disappearing and a new world is coming in. You know what? I suppose it's worth saying, because this feeds into our next part of this conversation, which is who is Mary Shelley? All of those things are true if you're white and free. Absolutely. I suppose that's a really like it's so easy to forget that amongst this Jane Austen thing or this bodice ripping thing, right? And that's often one of those criticisms that's put against these endless adaptations of Jane Austen and that kind of thing. Yes, I agree.

I think what I mean by the sort of bodice ripping in this moment is the sort of actually, I think we've inherited this vision of Jane Austen as very sort of uptight and polite and explicitly white, actually. And I think what I mean is like, the reality of this moment for people like Mary Shelley living through it is not that polite version that we have inherited now. Actually, this is a world of the breaking down of hierarchies. It's a messy time. Yeah, of course. And we have the debate and eventually the passing of abolition in this period as well. And certainly it continues in the United States for a long time afterwards. But you know, there is, there's a breaking down of everything, all the order that's been imposed previously, I think is what I mean, that this is not the world of Jane Austen as you know it. This is a darker, more serious, more exciting, more challenging reality actually that sits under it. Right. Mary herself then, who is Mary Godwin?

Never heard of her. No. Mary Godwin. Never heard of her. No. The end. Okay, so Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born in 1797 and she died in 1851. That is a delicious lifespan. That's you, Don, right?

That's me, yeah. I was like, what do you mean she's not that old when she dies, but you just mean the time period, yeah. I mean the time period. Yeah, I mean, obviously, if I was in her shoes, I would want to live longer, but to be born in the 1790s, the best decade, but to live long enough to see the Brontes writing. Yum, yum, yum. Love it. Okay, so her mother, for anyone who doesn't know, is Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She didn't know her mother. Her mother died shortly after giving birth to her,

but was a towering spectral figure in Mary's life growing up. Her father, I'm always really fascinated by William Godwin. He was a philosopher, he was a novelist, and he was also the author of several political works, including an inquiry concerning political justice. So pretty important, pretty intellectual parents that she's sprung from. And she has this culturally rich intellectual upbringing. She's a nepo baby. She is really. I mean, she's sort of a nepo baby who is born into- Not necessarily money. She's not rich.

She's an intellectual nepo baby, definitely. And she absolutely benefits from this upbringing. You know, she writes Frankenstein when she- well, she begins it when she's 19, for goodness sake. You know, this is a girl who has had the benefits of an immense education. Please, I was writing very tortured poetry in the style of John Keats when I was 19. So anything she can do, I can do way worse. Join us next episode when we will be reading aloud Anthony's poetry for his teenage years. I still have them. They are in my...

No, you don't. Yep. They're in my office in my mum's house. We will be airing those at some point. We won't ever be. Nope. no, no, no. And the poor boy that they were about, God love them. Didn't even have a clue. Such is the torture of having to be a gay teenager. Anyway, go on. We will also be bringing on the boy that those poems were about. Oh my God. That would be amazing. Anthony Delaney, this is your life. That would be, I would like, oh, where are you now? Okay.

Yeah, fine. Let's skip over that quickly. Thank you. Wow. Okay, more to follow. Okay, so Mary Wilsoncraft Godwin famously falls in love with the poet Percy Shelley. Now, Shelley is a pupil of her father's. He comes to the house to study with William Godwin. He is married already to a woman called Harriet and has several children, I think he has two children at this point. Nevertheless, despite the fact that Shelley is married, they fall in love and when Mary is just 16, he runs away with her to Europe and that's how they end up eventually on the side of Lake Geneva. Obviously it causes a huge scandal and Harriet Shelley is left behind Obviously, it causes a huge scandal and Harriet Shelley is left behind holding the kids, looking after them. She is an often forgotten figure in this story. And very tragically, she does eventually

in 1816 take her own life. Yeah, I struggle with this sometimes, right? Because we have this romanticization of this circle, right? And I get it. I totally fall for it myself. I'm very guilty of this myself. But actually what this circle often do, and it's not just Shelley that does this, but there's trails of sad, disappointed, hurt people that surrounds this circle. And you know, talking about that kind of nepo baby thing and the structures that are falling apart and then go on to be even more codified as the 19th century goes on. I sometimes wonder if they take the piss a little bit this lot. You know, I think we can fall for them a little bit too much that they are this kind of heroic cabal, but actually there's a wake of sadness and destruction left in their

wake often. Yeah. And the people who are left behind hurt and alone, as you say, are usually women, actually. And the fact that we remember Mary Shelley is because she had the opportunity in the education already to be able to write a text like Frankenstein. And a lot of the women who are on the edges of this coterie, as you say, the women like Harriet Shelley who were just left behind and discarded, let's be honest. It's the same with several of the women who Byron has relationships with. They don't have the opportunity to write a great novel that is going to last the ages because they're often holding the children these men have left behind. They're plunged into poverty. They are left without help or protection in this very complex, changing, scary world. And therefore they're forgotten. So yeah,

I think, I think they're a bunch of shits really. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'd probably have been friends with them, but yes, like it's- Oh, you would, you would be dying to go to one of their parties. Like you would, you would give anything to sit around the fire with your 18th glass of wine with Byron, of course, but I think we have to acknowledge that they were also, even in the context of their own times, they were pretty dreadful. Exactly. Yeah, people didn't like them. Like a lot of people didn't like them. So it's, it's kind of this, you know, we've talked about the girl bossification of the likes of Anne Boleyn and stuff. And I'm not talking about that with Mary here, specifically, I'm talking about the

group more widely. And this kind of the way we romanticize the fecklessness. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The way we romanticize the fecklessness, whereas there's people at the edges of those fecklessness. Yeah, we give them a free pass, right? We're like, oh, they were tortured geniuses. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe they were just dickheads. Yeah, maybe they were just dickheads. Okay, so in this circle of dickheads, obviously we have Percy Bish Shelley himself, who, as I said, is a poet. He's very political, which kind of suits the background that Mary has come from and Mary herself is interested in and well versed in. Then we have Lord Byron, who I think, I mean, have we, have we ever done an episode on Lord Byron?

No, we haven't, you know. That's scandalous because we definitely need to do that. You know, he, that's a whole other podcast, but Lord Byron is obviously a very famous poet. He has this huge cultural influence. He has sexual relations with men and women, with people deemed hugely inappropriate by white aristocratic society in Britain that he comes from. He's enormously well-travelled and I'm always fascinated by the fact that he goes and spends so much time and is associated with places like Greece and Albania. Obviously, in this case, he's at Lake Geneva and he's still considered a British Romantic poet. But actually, I think the cultures that he's steeped in are so different from the British culture at the time in so many ways and he

actively seeks them out. So he's fascinating. Also, at this gathering at Lake Geneva, we have John Polidori. I always feel sorry for John Polidori. I secretly quite fancy him. He's a physician, a personal physician to Lord Byron no less, and he's also an author in his own right and he's forgotten about. And at this gathering from which Frankenstein is born, there is a vampire novel, possibly the first ever vampire novel born, that Polidori writes, and it's just forgotten that he did that. Come on. Well, it's that, you know, we're talking about people that are collateral damage. And in a way,

despite the fact that he's a man, he becomes a bit of that collateral damage, right? He's creatively overlooked, definitely. Yeah. It also says something about class and status, because he is not the same as Byron. I mean, Shelley is not the same as Byron either in terms of social class, but Byron is calling those shots often and Byron's almost allowing and not allowing people to rise around him. So again, it really brings this idea of, you know, is Byron a patriarch kind of thing on the surface of it?

Absolutely not. But he's still calling the shots and even decades later, centuries later, he still is. ALICE Yeah. And he, you know, he sort of holds court, doesn't he? Everyone gravitates towards him, because he is a member of the aristocracy in a way that the others aren't, you're completely right. And at the house in late Geneva, he has all these exotic animals, you know, there's sort of peacocks wandering in and out. He has, does he have like a monkey or something? Obviously, there's the famous story about him bringing in a bear at university. And you know, he always has this kind of menagerie of creatures and menagerie of people. He kind of collects both really. And as you say, kind of,

he is a patriarch in that sense, albeit an unconventional one. He's the sort of the centre of gravity around which everything orbits. And he is the one who comes up with this idea, you know, it's a dark night, don't forget, there's been this volcanic eruption in Indonesia, then termed the East Indies, that nobody realises is connected, by the way, to this climatological disaster that's happening across the northern hemisphere. And I wrote about this in my next book that's coming out next year, actually, but it's really hard But it's really hard to overstate how significant this moment was. We've had the Battle of Waterloo months before. Europe is calming down from vast warfare. There's huge loss of life.

There are veterans returning. And now the skies are black. As we said, it's snowing in, and this is happening not just in Europe, by the way, but in North America as well. There's a really great diary entry from, I think it's by John Adams before he is US president. He's in London. Interestingly, it's an entry for the 4th of July. He talks about how it will not stop raining in London. There are storms, there's torrential rain, there's flooding in the streets. It's horrendous. And everyone is kind of, you know, there's therefore huge food shortages, there are famines. This is a really serious moment.

It impacts oceanic travel, you know, this is a trade, this is really, really serious. And it's in this context that they all sit down together in Late Geneva, Byron, etc. and they begin to tell ghost stories and you can absolutely imagine the atmosphere. But talking of Byron being in charge, it's that it's Byron who says, right, everyone go to your room and write your own version of this. And I think what's so fascinating about that particular coterie is that your value in that group is creativity. If you are not able to create, you are cast aside. You know, Mary, at this point, she's not married to Shelley.

She's run away with him. She's caused scandal back home. She's risked her reputation, albeit she's from a radical family. Maybe it's not that important to her, but in the context of, think about this, is the age of Jane Austen. Your reputation does matter. The hierarchies back home do matter. Who you are is certainly for women. She's risked it all for this guy whose wife is back home and does take her own life in the same year. She's 19. She's faced with these experienced, impressive men. Don't forget, there's a physician here, there's a trained physician. Byron is an aristocrat. And so she must have been feeling so much pressure to come up with a fantastic story in this moment. She must have thought, I have to impress them to keep Percy interested in me,

to keep my place. You're right. Yeah, I've never thought about it like that. She must have felt that bit of pressure. And actually, that makes me double think about what I'm about to read next, which is this idea of how it came to her. And it's in my notes. So I'll just have a quick read of it here and then we can talk about it a little bit more in detail, Maddie. But she says, I busied myself to think of a story, one which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror. I saw the pale student of on hallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. You know, she describes it as and it has been described as a waking dream almost. So it does sound like, despite what you're saying, and I think you're probably right,

she kind of sells it as in like, well, Jesus, it just kind of magically came to me, which I think is interesting, right? Because there's a bit of spin going on there. Yeah, absolutely. And this is classic of the romantic movement, right? This idea that creativity takes over your entire body and person. Think about

John Quincy's Confessions of an Opium Eater or think of William Wordsworth in the Lake District lying on the floor of his parlour because he's taken too much opium to try and help him write, and his sister Dorothy's mopping his forehead, and another figure who falls by the wayside, by the way, to a certain extent, although she has been recovered in recent years. There's this idea of creativity, you have to enter a heightened state, whether that's through drugs or whether it's through drink or whether it's through almost like a meditative process. It's no surprise to me here that Mary is trying to make herself seem legitimate. Don't forget that this comes from the introduction. She writes this in the introduction legitimate. So don't forget that this comes from the introduction, she writes this in the introduction

of Frankenstein. So this is like self myth making, right? She's like, oh, I entered a waking dream, and all this genius story came to me. Like, you can still see her manuscripts for Frankenstein. She worked on this for several years. Don't forget to publish, she's there in 1816 beginning this. It's published in 1818. She reworks it, she reworks it. Shortly after she's spent the time in Lake Geneva, she comes to Bath. She writes a lot of this novel in Bath. By the way, when Percy's ditched her and goes back to London, I think for a while. This is work. This is hard work. Any writer will tell you this. You don't just sit there and you're struck by lightning and a great idea and then it all kind of word vomits out of you and suddenly have finished manuscript like she's writing herself into the mythology of the romantics.

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Find American History Hit twice a week, every week, wherever you get your podcasts. American History Hip, a podcast from History Hip. Right, so we have this self-mythologizing that's happening around the writing, where she worked incredibly hard. It wasn't just a waking dream, she had years spent on this manuscript. What is it about then? What is Frankenstein about? Because people get this wrong, right, at the very basic level of knowing who Frankenstein

is. Yeah, Frankenstein is the Doctor, not the monster, as everyone hopefully will know by now. Okay, so Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, to give it its full title, it is written by Mary Shelley, but it is published anonymously in 1818, at the time she's 21 when it comes out. And I mean, it's so fascinating that it's published anonymously. It is, you know, you think about two decades later when the Brontes are writing and when Emily Brontë publishes Wuthering Heights, the newspaper reports say it's an abomination and that there's no way a woman could have written this, that it must have been written by a man. It's so

morally bankrupt and sexually vile and disgusting. You can see why in 1818 Mary Shelley publishes this anonymously. To to a certain extent, Jane Austen published anonymously as well. Certainly, I think at the beginning of her career, she has what comes first, is it sense of sensibility? And then when Pride and Prejudice comes out, it just says by the author of Sense and Sensibility, all the other way around. Apologies if I'm getting that wrong. But as I said, this is kind of, you talked about like sad boy summer, this is absolutely sad girl summer in 1818 when this is published. And we have Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey in the same year. So both of them, interestingly, kind of bring with them social commentary and a kind of

like a moral warning. Austen's in the sense that it's a satire of earlier Gothic novels and the kind of hysteria of them and the sort the ridiculousness and that actually people reading them need to calm down and get a bit of a grip and their imaginations have run away with them a little bit. But Frankenstein is concerned with, I suppose, the advancement of science, the power that men in particular have, which I think is interesting given the context of where she sits in this wider sort of social circle. So it's an epistolary novel in that it's written as a series of letters, which is very, I mean, you do get it in the 19th century, but it's very 18th century, right? This is sort

of do you it's the earliest form of the novel, right? I find it very, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're so right. And then it has it. But I see I hate 18th century novels is probably one of my least favorite things about the 18th century. I spent a lot of time as an undergrad doing an English degree, reading the 18th century novels. Oh, it's just grim. But yes, it's there. It's used. I mean, even the ones later in Dracula, I hate I'm just like, Oh God, stop this. But yeah, I don't like it. I love them. I remember being in school probably in about, I

don't know, year eight or nine. So how old are you then? Like, kind of in more than 13. And I remember having to write a series of letters as the characters from The Woman in White talking of 19th century novels. And I loved it. And that was a real, like switch clicked in my head moment where I was like, Oh, yeah. Oh, no, that's nice. I like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I have a weakness and a fondness for letters, although I agree they can be tedious. And certainly the 18th century ones where you've got to read like 20 letters in one chapter and you just think boring. Boring. And there's no description and I love description. But anyway, sorry, let's get back to Victor Frankenstein. And it's him that's creating what becomes referred to as a monster.

Yes. Back on track. Okay. So Victor Frankenstein is a scientist, he's a doctor. He groups together a load of body parts of dead people and he sews them all up. He electrocutes them and he brings it to life, this creature that he creates. And that is the monster. Frankenstein is the doctor.

The monster is the monster. The monster comes to life and it's really a question about not only where creativity comes from but where the soul comes from because this monster is animated into existence and straight away he's lonely. He wants a companion. He doesn't understand his place in the world. Frankenstein refuses to make him a companion despite what the sequel films of the 20th century would tell you with Frankenstein's bride etc. So the creature gets angry and fair enough, he didn't ask to be created. And he seeks revenge by killing all of Frankenstein's loved ones. So it's not a cheery novel. It's

not light. No. Can I just tell you this? Yeah, go on. I went to see Benedict Cumberbatch play Frankenstein at the National Theatre a few years ago. Oh, yes, where they swapped the roles. Yes. I wanted to see that iteration where Benedict was the monster and that's what we ended up seeing.

But more iconic than that was we sat beside, not because we know her, we absolutely don't, we sat beside Anna Wintour that night. I beg your pardon. Yeah, the entire way through the thing she kept her sunglasses on. And I was like, no, she didn't. She did. And we were close to the front. Like, so they if they wanted to, they could have looked out and seen Anna Wintour in there in her in her sunglasses. But it was because there was a lot of flash, apparently. So and there was a lot of flash. Yeah, all that electricity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I cannot believe you've never told me this.

Have I not? No, that's wild. What I love about the ending of the book is Frankenstein dies trying to stop the monster. The monster just disappears up to the Arctic. I love that for him. Where else would you go? Yeah, exactly. Well, that's so interesting, right? This monstrous creation doesn't have a space in society. Yeah, exactly. So he has to go somewhere that seems completely uncivilized. And you know, certainly to a very early 19th century imagination, the Arctic is that it's an unconquered wilderness. So you know, this is a book about the sort of the risk of men, quite specifically, playing God. Interestingly, all God. Interestingly, the monster obviously sees Frankenstein as his father, but there are no mother figures in this. All the mother characters

or sister characters are dead or absent. I think that's so telling when we think about, obviously not to psychoanalyze too much, but when we think about Mary's own life and the death of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, very early on, and that kind of huge absence in her life that's so present all the time. I suppose there's a theme about the question of responsibility in science. Don't forget we're coming out of the period of the Enlightenment when there has been enormous exploration. Think of the voyages of Captain Cook. There have been experiments in electricity and or galvanism, which we will talk about in a minute. But these have all come at a cost. And certainly, Mary is aware of the issues that colonial expansion has brought in

terms of slavery, in terms of these quote unquote encounters that men like Cook have had with indigenous peoples around the world. She is from a family who would have been aware and indeed wrote about that. So there's those kind of questions being raised in it. And also, I suppose, about the permanency of death, right? And the moral questions that come with that because this is something that was really being considered and explored in this period. Is death final? Is there a way to reverse this process and to bring people back from the dead? And it sounds to us kind of fantastical. But given the sort of vast, huge advancements of science in this moment, like this was a genuine thing that people were thinking about and worrying about. I'm worrying about. You mentioned galvanism there, Maddie, and I have an image in front of me, which I've never seen this before. And it's really quite striking. It is. Wow. Okay. At the center

of the image, there is a man who is sitting upright in very zombified pose from a coffin, the lid's been strewn away. There is an alive man who's standing over him with his arms in the air as if to say, Holy Jesus Christ, what's going on here? This is a bit too much. That's the official caption. Yes. Oh, it's called a galvanized corpse. And then we have in the bottom left hand corner, we have two demons, which is really, really interesting. And they're apparently saying, because I can't read that time, but I've got a transcription. It says there, we've lost him after all see, they are bringing him to life again. So these demons

in hell or wherever they are, are going, ah, shite, there's Johnny gone back up. They've taken him back to earth because he's back to life. And now it's he's gone back there. So it's really like, it's funny. It is funny. And it's clearly meant to be funny at the time too. Like they're taking the piss as well. But it's quite striking, isn't it? It's quite awning. So tell me a little bit about what this Galvanism is exactly. Yes. So the history of Galvanism and electricity more generally in the 18th and early 19th century is really, really interesting. And it's quite a big history. So I'm just going to give the highlights of it here because you can go away and read about this if you're interested. There's so much. So Maddie's just giving you homework. Yeah, go away.

There will be a test next week. So there's an Italian scientist called Luigi Galvin in the 1780s, and he notices that if you pass an electrical charge through the legs of a dead frog, they kind of twitch and convulse, because the electricity goes through the muscle tissue, I suppose, and it makes it twitch. And he starts to do public demonstrations. And really soon across Europe and all the way to Britain, this idea spreads and people start making their own galvanistic equipment, which is too scientifically complex to explain, but basically you can crank the handle and there'll be two orbs or discs and it creates a crackling bit of electricity between them and you can direct that and electrocute stuff. There are other people who start to do this. And one of the huge moments comes in the earliest years of the 1800s, when a man called Giovanni

Aldid, who is Galvin's nephew, by the way, talking of like nepotism in certain lines of work in this period, he does a public demonstration. And this is fascinating. I'm obsessed with this. So we know from previous episodes that we've done on body snatching and sort of anatomy in this period that often it would be the bodies of murderers specifically who were executed and then they would be cut up in anatomy schools. There's a man in 1803 called George Forster who is executed for, I think, I believe killing his wife and baby, not a nice guy. His body is used in this demonstration and he is electrocuted. And there's an account from the time, and we have to take this with a pinch

of salt because there's no way we can know this for real. But supposedly when he's electrocuted, he sits bolt upright on the anatomist slab, his eyes open, and one of his legs starts moving. And for a second, people think that he has come back to life. So this is kind of horror. And I suppose in this image you're describing, these demons trying to drag this person back down to hell. In terms of experiments on human beings in this period, it is really the worst of the worst who are being experimented on and brought back to life in lots of ways, the people who least deserve to be reanimated. So I think that's kind of what this image is talking to. But certainly So I think that's kind of what this image is talking to. But certainly Mary Godwin was aware of these Galvanistic experiments. She writes in a later introduction to Frankenstein, which I think

comes from the 1830s, one of the later issues of it. She writes, perhaps the corpse would be reanimated. Galvanism had given token to such things. So we know, for example, that when she's living in Bath after she's been out to Lake Geneva and she's finishing the manuscript of Frankenstein, literally a few doors down, there's a doctor in Bath called Dr. Wilkinson who is doing these experiments and he's electrocuting frogs for a paying audience to come and see in between sessions at the assembly rooms to dance or the Roman baths or whatever to bathe and get rid of their gout. So it becomes a kind of popular spectacle in culture in England in this moment. So yeah, that's go away and read about Galvanism because you could lose hours like it is genuinely fascinating.

Yeah, it is interesting. I mean, it's interesting these kind of myths and this quasi truth myth thing that is being built up here around this whole this whole idea of Frankenstein and his monster, let alone around Mary herself. And of course, one of the most famous myths that gets embroiled in her life and her writing is the virginity graveyard story. Now we have draped ourselves for some history hit social content over this particular headstone. So tell us a little bit about this virginity graveyard story involving Mary and Percy. Yeah, so I think the thing to say about Mary Shelley is that her life is just absolutely dogged by death and by grief, right? So obviously from the earliest moments of her life, her mother has died to give birth to her, and she just constantly loses people around her. One of the things that she does growing up

is that she spends a lot of time at her mother's grave in St Pancras Old Church, which is just behind King's Cross station today. As you say, we went fairly recently. Some of my 19th century ancestors were bigamistically married in that church, which is interesting. So yeah, I have a little personal connection to it. But so the story goes that when Mary Godwin, as she is then, and Percy Shelley first start their courtship, and he's still married, he's a pupil of her father, I mean, she's just 16 at this point, he's like 21, 22, which comes with its own issues. Not only is he married, but she's a child and he's significantly older. But supposedly the graveyard and her mother's grave

in particular, a site that's very important to her, is the site where they meet and spend time together. Now in the 19th century, and certainly in the 20th century, biographers of the pair do suggest that this is the place where they consummate their relationship for the first time, it's where Mary supposedly loses her virginity. There is no evidence of this, however, certainly not in the letters that we have between Mary and Percy. But I think it kind of speaks to the closeness in terms of Mary's Gothic imagination and the way that she lived her life and the desire that we all have, I suppose, to kind of intertwine the two of them, right? So much of the Gothic genre is kind of about sexuality and sexual norms and kind

of sexual deviancy to a certain extent. And I think this kind of falls within that. And it's a kind of, you can see how this myth is built up, but I'm afraid it's very unlikely to be true. Yeah, I was going to say, I'm going to call bullshit on it. It's it's just it's actually a little bit gross. Do you know what I mean? Like it is a bit where they put like the people that are writing this later are putting this 16 year old girl and yeah, sure, we have the whole age of consent is different at

this time, whatever. But they're putting her in the graveyard on her mother's grave. It's voyeuristic. Whatever, guys. Yeah, like just get a fucking hobby. Yeah, exactly. Which you could say for many biographers of the 19th and 20th century. That doesn't involve 16 year old girls.

Exactly. Yeah. Interesting fact, if you go to the graveyard today at St. Pancras Old Church, Mary Wollstonecraft, her grave marker is still there and you can see it. And people leave all kinds of things. They leave like pens. Some people leave like lipstick kisses on the marker and stuff, which I think is kind of interesting. But her body is not there. It was moved by Percy Florence Shelley, who is her grandson. He's the son of Mary and Percy Shelley. It was moved to Bournemouth in the mid-19th century, so her body isn't there. Now, an interesting link to a previous episode we've done. Percy Florence Shelley, so the son of Mary Shelley, the grandson of Mary Wollstonecraft. When we did the episode on the London Torso Killer, which is a really grim history, but do you go back and listen to that? Because one of the victims in those murders, a leg was thrown over the garden wall of Percy Florence Shelley in London.

I remember you saying that. Yeah, which is just a weird little link. He's turning up in random places. Somebody I remember you saying that. Yeah. Which is just a weird little link. He's turning up in random places. Somebody needs to look into him. Yeah. There's bodies aplenty around that fella. Okay, well there's-

Wow. There's so much death that surrounds Mary Godwin slash Mary Shelley as she becomes later. You know, we don't really have time here to talk about all the deaths that happen around her. There's Percy's first wife, if we said. I mean, that's actually a separate episode. We should do that episode. Yeah, we don't really have time here to talk about all the deaths that happen around her. There's Percy's first wife, if we said that. I mean, that's actually a separate episode. We should do that episode. Yeah, we really should. We should also do an episode on Fanny Imley, who is

Mary's maternal half-sister. So she is the baby that Mary Wollstonecraft has during the French Revolution in Paris with an American diplomat. It's a wild story that involves them going treasure hunting in Scandinavia. That's a whole other thing. We'll do that episode. But I just want to flag another of the great deaths in Mary's life that kind of, I suppose, contribute to the sort of the Gothic mythology around her. And that is Percy Shelley's own death in 1822. Now this makes my eyes roll so much. I have no time for Percy Shelley. He drowns in a boating accident, which suppose he couldn't have helped, but like it just irritates me. You know, he's a young father of

several children. The children from his first marriage have been left motherless, and he's abandoned them. And he's also had multiple children with Mary, many of whom die, by the way, at very young ages. And it's very, very tragic. When he dies, this is what makes my eyes roll. He's only identifiable by the book of Keats' poetry in his pocket because he's found 10 days later in the water. This just reminds me of Willoughby in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility when he first meets Marianne, one of the sisters in the novel, and she's so taken by him. And he's like, Oh, he's so performative. He's like, who's been reading Shakespeare's sonnets? Because he sees the book

out on the table. He's like, Oh, that's so funny. Because I have a miniature pocketbook of Shakespeare sonnets that I carry with me everywhere. And it's just such a cringe moment of like red flag, immediate red flag, you have a tiny book of Shakespeare in your pocket, please. That's embarrassing. You're the guy who brings a feckin guitar to a house party. I'm like, leave that at home. Nobody wants to hear you saying there's a world in which this is all lies, you know, because you know, the whole unburned heart wrapped in silk thing as well. That's not true. But it's still... Yeah, yeah. So Percy is identified by this book of poetry, Yawn. He is burned, I was gonna say burned at the stake. That's not the one. He's burned on a pyre, funeral pyre. I believe on the

beach, there's lots of paintings of him sort of being burned on the beach. There is a myth, and I actually don't know if it's true, but I sort of want it to be, that Percy's heart is cut out of his body before he is, the rest of him is burned, that it's wrapped in silk and that Mary keeps it in her desk drawer for many, many years. There is a world in which it's not his heart, but it's actually one of his lungs that wasn't damaged during the cremation, but it's been kind of calcified and therefore is kind of, you know, it lasts a really long time. I mean, look, it's the sort of thing that Mary would do. Yeah. Like fair play. And it wouldn't, she wouldn't be the first woman in history to walk around with the heart slash head slash hand. Yeah.

You know, I'm thinking of Queen Victoria. I'm thinking of there's a wife of one of the Tudors. Oh, who is it? I can't think now. Jim Tudor. Jim Tudor. No, yeah, sure. Jim Tudor.

He walks around with the heart of her husband. Yeah. So it's not unusual. It's not as unusual as you think. But I mean, it's just sort of classic mythology, isn't it? What started the Civil War? What ended the conflict in Vietnam? Who was Paul Revere? And did the Vikings ever reach America? I'm Don Wildman, and on American History Hit, my expert guests and I are journeying across the nation and through the years to uncover the stories that have made America.

We'll visit the battlefields and debate floors where the nation was formed, meet the characters who have altered it with their touch, and count the votes that have changed the direction of our laws and leadership. Find American History Hit twice a week, every week, wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, I'm going to move on now to the Frankenstein as this kind of birth of sci-fi, right? And I don't care about sci-fi. Now, my husband very much does. He reads an awful lot of it and he enjoys that whole thing. I don't. So to me, this isn't, I absolutely see that it is sci-fi, but to me, I don't understand it in that world. What about you? Do you do you see it as part of that? I completely agree. I mean, I as an adult, I'm not a huge sci-fi reader. I do love a John Wyndham novel. Day of the Triffids. Oh, that I've heard of.

The Chrysalids. Oh, gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous. I feel like it's not for you. Nah, it's not for you. I don't even like Doctor Who. And I like all of those people involved. I just can't get on board. Yeah, same. I understand. I think that it is you can class it as a sci fi novel. Is it the first? I don't know. I'm sure experts could make claims for earlier versions. You know, I think you could make an argument for something like Gulliver's Travels

with its, you know, sort of miniature people and giants, etc. You could make an argument for that being kind of sci-fi and that comes in the 18th century. So it sort of doesn't interest me whether it's sci-fi or not. I think to me it's a Gothic novel. I think that you can read its legacy in so much of the Brontes writing, you know, in fact so much of the 19th century writing, in fact, so much of the 19th century gothic genre in general. The fact that there are so many cinematic adaptations of this, theatrical adaptations, Frankenstein is a story that has stayed with us that has been changed in so many ways. Let's not forget what's the classic TV show that you were in, Penny Dreadful. Frankenstein's told in there, interestingly, along with a load of Victorian Gothic stories. I always think people, certainly in the adaptations that we see on screen,

I think with the, is it del Toro's about to release a version as well. I think in so many of those adaptations, it's portrayed as deep into the 19th century. I think we forget it's portrayed as a bit like deep into the 19th century. And I think we forget it's 1818. The fact that Austen is still publishing, she's dead, by the way, in 1818, but Northanger Abbey is published posthumously. This is the world that Austen until very recently lived in. This is the world that's only just finished fighting the Napoleonic Wars. This isn't the sort of North and South, like big industrial towns version of the 19th century and there's no Queen Victoria yet. So that kind of irks me a little bit because I love this kind of strange time of fluctuation between the 18th and the 18th century and the sort of beginning of

the Victorian period. And it's so often overlooked or prettified, as you said at the beginning, it's kind of Bridgertonified and no shade to Bridgerton, it serves a purpose, I understand people love it, but that sort of chocolate box version, prettified, pale pinks and blues version of this world is not one that really existed. We see some of the aesthetics of the rich at the time, but it's a far more complicated, a darker, more interesting and more exciting world than that. It wasn't all bowing and curtsying and everyone politely getting worried about who fancied who. Yes, that went on and I don't want to dismiss that, but people are fighting for their lives, I hear that, asking questions like, what happens if we bring someone back from the dead? What are

the ethics of that? What happens if we end slavery? Are these people equal to these people? As a woman, are you allowed to write a story that is completely abhorrent and vile and violent and that questions male authority and put your name to it? Are people going to accept that? What is your place in the world? Everyone is reassessing their place in the world and what the world looks like in this moment. I really want to make a case for this being like the most exciting period. And I really wish we would do adaptations of it set in this moment. So on that call to identify the 1820s as the most exciting period of time in history, which, you know, I'm not going to actually argue too hard against that.

It's pretty bloody exciting and pretty important. I'll leave you with your thoughts right into it. Send us an email on afterdarkhistoryhit.com or leave a comment. And I've just discovered you can leave comments on the Spotify episodes. I did not know that.

So now I'm seeing all your comments on the episodes. So this is all very exciting and I feel like an old granny. Go back and listen to our final days of George the third episode. It'll give you some further context on this time period too.

I'm sure we have some other time. What else, Maddie, do we have that's this time period specific? We have a murder in St. James's Palace in, I think, 1812. Oh, yeah. We're about to do the Luddites in 1811. Anyway, look, go and listen to those episodes because we are going to be spending an awful lot more time in that time period.

So you're going to need to brush up on your 1800s to 1837. Thanks so much for listening. Leave us a five star view wherever you get your podcasts and other people can find us too. Bye.