Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

In the summer of 1816, Mary Godwin was eighteen years old and living beside Lake Geneva in Switzerland. She had run away from England with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was still married to someone else, and she had already lost a baby daughter. That year the weather turned strange across Europe. A volcano, Tambora, had erupted in Indonesia the year before, and the ash cooled the whole planet, so 1816 became known as the year without a summer. Rain kept the group indoors at the Villa Diodati, the house rented by the poet Lord Byron.

To pass the time they read German ghost stories aloud, and Byron proposed that each of them write one. Mary later wrote that she struggled for days to think of anything, then had a waking vision of a student kneeling beside the thing he had assembled. That became Frankenstein, the story of a young scientist who builds a living man out of dead matter and then abandons him in horror. The talk in that house had been about galvanism, the experiments in which electricity made dead muscle twitch, and about whether life itself might be manufactured.

The book appeared in London on 1 January 1818, in three volumes, anonymously, with a preface by Percy Shelley and a dedication to Mary's father, the philosopher William Godwin. Many reviewers assumed Percy had written it. Some were disgusted by it, but readers were not. A stage version, Presumption, opened in 1823 and was a hit, and it was the theatre that started the long habit of calling the creature Frankenstein rather than the man who made him. Mary put her name to the 1831 edition and added an introduction explaining how the story came to her.

It is often called the first science fiction novel, because the horror comes from knowledge and ambition rather than from ghosts or curses. Film locked the image in place in 1931, when Boris Karloff played the creature with the flat head and the neck bolts, none of which are in the book. Two centuries on, the name gets attached to any invention its makers cannot control.