Making the Monster: The Science Behind Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’

Chemist Harkup follows A Is for Arsenic with this entertaining look at Mary Shelley’s life and the science of her time. The work has a dual structure, following the life of Mary Shelley (1797–1851) chronologically while examining the elements of science in the narrative of the novel. Readers familiar with Shelley may recognize the famous origin story of Frankenstein in Lord Byron’s 1816 challenge at Villa Diodati in Switzerland that he, Mary, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and others should each “write a ghost story.” Throughout, Harkup highlights individuals that Shelley knew who may have inspired characters in the novel. She also dutifully details the 18th- and 19th-century rise of chemistry as a science and the final decline of alchemy. Electricity features prominently in Harkup’s account, in particular “galvanism”: the “electrical stimulation of muscles to produce movement after death.” Harkup’s discussion of how Victor Frankenstein might have acquired his “raw materials” includes information on anatomists of the day and their means of acquiring corpses. Her description of bodily putrefaction after death and means of staving that off are not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach. Harkup’s fun potpourri of science and history should prove satisfying to both science readers and literary aficionados. [em](Feb.) [/em]