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This episode is brought to you by the Folio Society.
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The Folio Society is a small, independent publisher based in South London, owned by its employees. They revisit our favourite stories and ask how they ought to feel through design, illustration and materials. Frankenstein, the subject of this episode, is one of their carefully reimagined titles.
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Frankenstein lives between fire and ice. It's about what happens when ambition outruns restraint, when brilliance untethers itself from responsibility. And two centuries on, it still has that unsettling power.
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From the COVID to the introduction, the story is woven into every detail, deliberate, restrained, but quietly unsettling.
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It's Frankenstein, shaped with intention, holding its chill to the very last page and never quite thawing.
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You can order Frankenstein and explore the other books we keep coming back to@folioSociety.com TheBookClub that's Foliosociety.com TheBookClub Score more with the College branded Venmo debit card and earn up to 5% cash back with Venmo Stash Got paid back with the Venmo debit card you can instantly access your balance and spend on what you want, like game day, snacks, gear, tickets and more. The more you do, the more cash back you can earn. Plus, there's no monthly fee or minimum balance. Sign up now@venmo.com collegecard the Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank. NA Select Schools available. Venmo Stash terms and exclusions apply at@venmo me terms max $100 cash back per month the wrongs we must right, the
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fights we must win, the future we must secure together for our nation.
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This is what's in front of us. This determines what's next for all of us. We are marines. We were made for this. I suddenly beheld the figure of a man at some distance, advancing towards me with superhuman speed. I perceived, as the shape came nearer sight tremendous and abhorred, that it was the wretch whom I had created. His countenance bespoke bitter anguish combined with disdain and malignity, while its unearthly ugliness rendered it almost too horrible for human eyes. But I scarcely observed this. Rage and hatred had first deprived me of utterance, and I recovered only to overwhelm him with words expressive of furious detestation and contempt. Devil. I exclaimed, do you dare approach me? And do not you fear the fierce vengeance of my arm wreaked on your miserable head? Begone, vile insect. Or rather, stay, that I may trample you to dust and oh, That I could, with extinction of your miserable existence, restore those victims who you have so diabolically murdered.
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I expected this reception, said the demon. All men hate the wretched. How then must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things? Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me? How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace. But if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends. So, everybody, that is a glimpse behind the curtain of the book club, because that is how Tabby and I usually speak to each other.
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It's uncanny.
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I will glut the maw of death. And also the number of times Stabby has said to me, be gone, vile insects.
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So you will comply with my conditions?
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Exactly. So this is a tremendous scene from Mary Shelley's chilling novel Frankenstein, which was published anonymously in January 1818. And it's a scene in which our hero, Victor Frankenstein, the scientist, finally confronts his monstrous creation, the terrifying creature that he has brought to life, or animated with his experiments in chemistry and in galvanic electricity. In that scene, you get a sen of Victor's horror and loathing for his own creation. Basically his. His son, you might say.
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Yeah.
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But also the creatures. Slightly unusual combination of extreme violence. I will glut the more of death and reasoned argument.
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He's like Tommy Fury.
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Yeah. He's like, I expected this reception. That's sort of Roger Moorlite line, I think.
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Yeah, it is.
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So, Tabby, this is one of the foundational texts in the modern imagination, isn't it? It's known to millions of people who've never read the book. The idea of the scientists creating the monster is one of the most influential in all l or popular culture. It's arguably the first true science fiction novel. And at its heart is this brilliant creation, this reanimated corpse, which is Frankenstein's monster.
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Yeah. And it's interesting because most people think of him, the corpse, the creature, as he's known in the book as Frankenstein. He's always given his creator's name, but actually Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein, is the mad scientist who gives him life. But there's definitely something in that, because the two of them share this strange dualistic relationship. You know, they are intertwined, they're like foils for each other, and yet they're also like two sides of the same coin. But the creature itself, I mean, it's such an iconic image. It features every Halloween. It's the square head, the green face, the bolts. And because of that, because it's so iconic, it's been used time and time again to represent various things. It's been used in political campaigns to personify both political opponents and kind of massive societal concerns or dangers. It's become a byword for kind of the dangers of scientific progress, the idea of the creation destroying the creator, you know, untamed hubris. But it's also just a symbol of horror. Plain horror.
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Yeah, horror. And obviously a lot of that has to do with Hollywood, doesn't it? So the first film of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was made in 1910, and actually the monster has appeared, according to Wikipedia.
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Gave yourself away there.
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Yeah, I did give myself away, but, I mean, I'm not going to count them personally. 433 different films, and most of those actually bear no relation to Mary Shelley's novel at all. And the most recent, the end of 2025, the Guillermo del Toro film with Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi. I know you're huge friend of the show.
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Before you give, put in your little witticism. He is, in fact, a huge friend of the show.
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He hates Jacob Elordi, don't you?
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No, I'm his biggest fan. But I didn't love that film altogether. I thought it messed with the plot of it a bit. It had this glorious aesthetic to it, which I think was very gothic. And obviously we'll explore later how to cast Frankenstein as it gothic or is it something else? But for me, one of the most fascinating parts of having read Frankenstein and started doing a bit of digging on it was its writer, Mary Shelley. And she is a remarkable woman. She's something of a literary titan, a legend herself. She's very, very famous. And yet she's also been totally outshone by the monster, her own creation, ironically. And her life was one which is very complex and unusual itself. She was only 18 when she wrote Frankenstein, which is extraordinary.
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Yeah.
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I mean, when I think about what I was like when I was 18, it makes me shudder. And she was very, very famously married, possibly one of the most famous literary marriages of all time, to Percy Shelley.
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Yeah.
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The great romantic poet. And we will dig into all of that a bit more later. And also the wonderful story about how she wrote Frankenstein, because that too, is it's almost mythical. But before we get to that. Oh, tell us, Dr. Frankenstein, what did you make of the book when you first encountered it?
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So I read it at university and I was surprised. I think a lot of people who haven't read Frankenstein will be surprised by how unhorrifying it is. You know, there's a lot of landscape, there's a lot of nature writing. You know, you feel the, the weight of the late 18th century, kind of romantic description and so on.
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It's quite pensive, isn't it? It's quite contemplative.
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It's very contemplative. There's a lot of philosophizing, a lot of reflection about kind of enlightenment and romantic ideas, deals and ideas. And I didn't really, you know, I wasn't led to believe that. I thought it would be much more gothic novel. Storms overhead, castles crumbling cellars and people locked in dungeons. And there's actually much less of that than you might expect if in your head there's all the Hollywood stuff. What about you, Tammy?
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Yeah, I had a very similar response to it. So I read it when I was a teenager. I was very, very into reading the classics at the time. I thought I would love it. I knew of it. I loved the idea of it. I did like it. But I, like you, was kind of disappointed by the fact there was no horror, that it wasn't very romantic, it wasn't frightening, I thought, at all. So that was a bit disappointing. But I loved, I think I was slightly in love with the idea of it more than the reality. But I. And I was then and I still am now, I was in awe of Mary Shelley herself. I loved her whole story. I loved her relationship with Percy Shelley. So that was a big part of it for me.
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And actually, as we'll discuss, I think the idea of it is, to me is still more powerful.
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I totally agree.
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Than the narrative and the writing. I think it's the genius of Frankenstein as a book is the concepts and is the interplay of ideas rather than the propulsive narrative.
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Yeah. And that part of it is astounding. You know, it's both a really, really impressive and thought provoking kind of philosophical fable, but also just the idea of it written when it was by an 18 year old girl, totally original. Then, you know, we say it wasn't frightening, but to audiences reading it then it would have been quite frightening. It is astounding and you can't, you can't undermine that at all.
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All right, well, let's give people a little Sense of the, this astounding idea. Yeah. Of exactly what is in the book. Because I think people know there's a. There's a scientist, there's a monster, but there's actually so much more than that. So we'll start off. So basically the novel begins with a series of letters. It's an epistolary novel, which is exactly what a lot of readers in the late 18th century, early 19th century would expect.
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And that definitely adds to the tension of it because you're slowly, you're being drip fed.
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Yes.
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Information, you know, a series of escalating events.
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Yeah, yes, exactly. So we know that Mary Shelley had been reading Samuel Richardson's great 18th century book, Clarissa, a couple of years before she started writing this. So this is clearly. This bears the imprint of her own reading.
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Yeah.
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So the letters are by a guy called Captain Walton and he's an English explorer and he's trying to discover the North Pole, basically. And he tells his sister, you know, we have been on this great expedition and we've discovered, we've rescued this desperate, sickly man who's called Victor Frankenstein.
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Yeah.
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And Victor Frankenstein in the letters, tells Walton his story. This is why I'm here. And this is the terrible thing that has happened to me. And basically. Well, why don't you take us in, Tabby? He's from Geneva, isn't he?
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Yeah. So Victor's from Geneva. He grows up in a very, very happy family. They are all extremely fond of each other. It's a mother, a father, they're quite well off. He has two brothers, a younger one called William and an adopted sister called Elizabeth, who his mother takes on as a ward and who is basically destined to be his future bride. He is a massive, massive science nerd. From a young age, he's obsessed with concepts like the philosopher's stone. And then as a result of that, he goes and studies at the University of Ingolstadt. Yeah. Then there his scientific interests shift a bit and he becomes obsessed with discovering the secret of life and creating a perfect being.
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So he does create this living being, doesn't he? He basically gets the dead body parts of criminals. The scene, very famous, this is the one scene from Frankenstein. Everybody knows, or they think they know. They think they know because it owes more to Hollywood than to the book of basically, Victor sewing together bits of these bodies and creating his creature. That's. That's really what the monster is called throughout the book. The creature. The creature comes to life. Victor, horrified by it. This very famous scene, he's like, good God. Well, I thought this was going to be beautiful. It's actually really horrific.
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He wanted to create a perfect, beautiful being. And then from the minute he claps eyes on it, he's repulsed.
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Yeah. He basically has a sort of breakdown and runs away and abandons his creature. Then he goes off to back to Geneva and he discovers that his little brother, you mentioned William, has been murdered. And he knows almost instinctively this is the work of this creature. Basically, I've created this being that is now gonna dog me and haunt me forever. An innocent woman is accused of the murder, and she is actually hanged for it.
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Yeah. Because Victor, actually, there's only one point in the whole book that Victor admits to creating this thing because, you know, who would believe him? Anyway, as a result of this, he goes to hunt down the creature to have his vengeance on him. And there's kind of these long passages, very, very romantic. Traveling through the mountains. It's all about nature. And then he finally discovers the creature and he confronts him. And that's the scene that you and I read so beautifully at the beginning of this episode.
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Right. So now we've got a story within a story within a story. So the creature is telling Victor his story, and Victor is telling this to Robert Walton, and Robert Walton is telling it to his sister in the letters.
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Because at this point when Victor and the creature meet, the creature then tells Victor his story. And almost, it's almost like a justification for why he is the way that he is.
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Right. So the creature says, look, you cast me out, you created. The creature is very, very articulate. So this is a big difference with the Hollywood movies. The creature is extremely well spoken. The creature basically says, look, I went off, you abandoned me. I became a vegetarian. Well, he starts life as a vegetarian.
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He wanders around the world.
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Yeah.
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Not knowing who he is, why he is, where he came from. He starts eating berries and nuts to survive. He actually is a vegetarian.
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Yeah.
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And then he comes across this kind of fairy tale, like little hut in the woods inhabited by a very poor but very noble family. And he kind of falls in love with them a bit. And he spends his time listening to them from their shed to them talk and discuss and debate. And fairly implausibly, he learns through this eavesdropping about the nature of the world, about the nature of philosophy, the human condition. And he learns to speak and to read. I never quite got how he learned to read from listening.
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But anyway, yeah, he sort of pieces it together because he also steals some books from them, doesn't he?
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Ah, he Does. He does. That's it. He learns to recognize.
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So, like Plutarch's Lives and Paradise Lost and whatnot.
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Yeah. All books that Mary Shelley was a massive fan of.
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Exactly. So he basically goes on this sort of education course. Anyway, eventually they see him.
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Yeah. He decides that he's going to talk to the blind patriarch. Old father of it.
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That's right. Yes.
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Because he think. He knows that he looks different from them. So he thinks, well, I can earn the grandfather's kind of trust and fondness and respect if I speak to him. And then they do talk and they do get on very well. But then everyone else comes back, sees that he's a terrifying monster made of so.
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Of sewn together bits of dead bodies.
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Yeah, yeah, exactly. And naturally they freak out. And he runs away feeling abandoned, feeling rejected once more.
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It's his rejection that leads him down the path of kind of violence. Because then it's at this point that he thinks, oh, gosh, my life's in ruins. I've been very hard done by. It's all the fault of my creator.
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He goes in search of Victor.
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He goes in search of Victor, murders Victor's brother. So this is the story that the creature tells Victor. And then after this, he basically persuades Victor. He says, look, I will behave myself if you will make me a mate. If you will make me. You know, I'm Adam. And we'll get onto this later on. I would like you to make me an Eve. A female creature.
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Mrs. Frankenstein.
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Exactly. Mrs. Well, Mrs. Creature, I suppose.
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Mrs. Creature. Mrs. Monster.
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And Victor says he'll do this. But then Victor changes his mind, doesn't he? He thinks, oh, this is a terrible idea. I'm not gonna do this.
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Yeah. Because he's afraid of what they're. You know, if they breed.
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Yeah.
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What it'll do to the world.
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What it'll do to the world. And. And poor behavior from Victor, I think he dumps the body of this. That he's been working on, of the female in the sea. So the monster's like, okay, well, all bets are off now. And he murders Victor's best friend. And Victor marries his adopted sister, Elizabeth. He murders her. The creature murders her as well.
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On their wedding night. On their wedding night. Yeah.
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Which is harsh.
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Yeah. That seems. That seems like an extreme step to take personally.
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My sympathies, as listeners will discover, are slightly. With the creature. I think the creature has been hard done by.
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True.
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And Victor has behaved poorly. And he's got it coming, basically.
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Yeah. I don't know if you should murder her as a result.
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But we'll get to all that later, all right? So Victor now says, well, fine, I'm gonna hunt you down.
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Yeah, all bets are off, and he
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hunts the creature down. This is basically why they've ended up at the North Pole. Victor has tracked the creature ever further north. And this is the point at which Robert Walton finds Victor. And Victor's a sort of. He's a wreck of a man, frostbitten,
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depressed, having an existential crisis.
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And so then Walton continues to write letters to his sister, and he says, look, what happened was actually Victor ended up dying. You know, cold, misery, exhaustion, illness.
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Yeah, I like this bit. He sees a vast form.
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Yeah.
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Kind of hankered over Victor's body. This is the very end of the book. And actually, rather than being triumphant, the monster is. The creature is miserable. He's mourning Victor. He's mourning Victor. He is feeling repentant for all of the wrong that he has done, the murders he has committed. And then, you know, mourning the loss of his father. I mean, Victor is essentially the creature's father. He goes off and. Well, he tells Walton he's gonna go off and throw himself onto a bonfire so that no one like him can ever be made again, and nothing like this can ever happen again.
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And that's the end of the creature. That's the end of Walton's story and of the creature. That's the story of Victor Frankenstein and his lovable creation.
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Yeah, his pet creature.
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Now, the story behind the story is, as you say, Tabby, just as good, if not better.
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Yeah.
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Than Frankenstein herself. So this is the story of Mary Shelley. So tell all, please, Tabby, because you're a massive Mary Shelley fan.
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So Mary Shelley was born in London in 1797 to William Godwin, who was a very famous radical philosopher in his own day, and a part pioneering feminist called Mary Wollstonecraft.
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Yeah.
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And Mary's mother made her name by writing A Vindication of the Rights of woman in 1792, which kind of highlighted the secondary status of women in society, which at that time was rarely, if ever, acknowledged. Anyway, this earned her a lot of admiration among a certain type, kind of the radical intelligentsia of the day, but obviously the dislike and contempt of kind of the public at large. But both Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin were heavily influenced by the ideals of the French Revolution. And I thought this was so interesting. She actually went to France to partake in the Revolution at its. At its height. And they were part of a small radical group In England, which they were called the English Jacobins. I'm a big fan of them. And this included people like Thomas Paine and William Blake.
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Okay. Wow.
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My absolute favorite person ever. So Mary Shelley obviously grew up aware of being kind of the progeny of two extraordinary, unusual people. And she acknowledges this, which I also think is admirable, because a lot of writers, maybe they'd like to kind of say that they're born, some kind of divine talents, an innate genius. But she says it is not singular that as the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity, I should, very early in life, have thought of writing. I think that's modest. I admire that.
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She's very much in the shadow of her parents as she grows up, isn't she? So you mentioned Mary Wollstonecraft, who's pretty well known now as a pioneering feminist.
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Definitely she is, yeah.
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But at the time, probably better known, actually, was William Godwin, this sort of radical, radical writer, thinker.
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He was a celebrity.
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He was a celebrity. He'd been a sort of dissenting minister, and then he became an atheist. He wrote this very celebrated attack. Well, I say celebrated, but much criticized attack on institutions like the law, government, marriage, all of these things. And he said, basically, they held people in chains. This will be important for Frankenstein.
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Yeah.
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Godwin thought that people were born basically good and innocent and in a state of nature, and that they are corrupted. It's Rousseau, and it's very Rousseau, like Jean Jacques Rousseau, the Genevan philosopher. Philosopher, who thought similarly, that people are basically good and they're corrupted by society and institutions. This is what Godwin thought as well. And actually, Tabby, I see one of your notes. You wrote the. The telltale words. I suspect that Dominic Sambra would not care for him. And actually, you misjudged me because I read William Godwin's book, Caleb Williams at university. It's brilliant, and it's a precursor of Frankenstein. So, Caleb Williams, there's this chase where this guy, Caleb Williams, the hero, has uncovered secrets about this aristocratic bloke who basically pursues him across the world. Idea of the pursuit, I think clearly ends up as a sort of. In Frankenstein, as Victor and the creature.
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B
But let me explain myself, because the reason I thought that you wouldn't necessarily approve of Godwin is because I know that you are, you know, you loathe hypocrites.
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A
Yeah, thanks.
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B
And there is a hypocritical portion of Godwin in that even though he decried marriage, he and Mary Wollstonecroft did eventually get married.
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A
I don't think that's necessarily hypocritical, though. I think that's a bit harsh from you.
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B
No, possibly not. But he did say he, he was very against it, but he said it was so that, you know, to make her happier because Mary was pregnant with Mary Shelley, the future Mary Shelley. Anyway, he was definitely, definitely a brilliant, brilliant man. And as you say, his writing and his political views would influence all of Mary Shelley's works her whole life, not just Frankenstein. Anyway, her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, tragically died just after Mary was born, relating to, you know, complications to do with the birth. And this left Godwin and totally, totally bereft. And Mary and her half sister, who was born from an affair that her mother had earlier, were left to him and he therefore got married again.
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To their neighbour.
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B
To their neighbour, exactly. Mary Jane Claremont. Because he thought that, you know, the girls needed some kind of motherly warmth to raise them. And she wooed him, she chatted him up with the famous line, is it possible that I behold the immortal Godwin?
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Who wouldn't fall for that?
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B
I mean, that would do it for me for sure. Yeah, definitely, definitely, definitely.
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A
So now Mary Shelley's being brought up by William Godwin, who's pretty chilly as a father, actually.
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B
Yeah, he's invested in her for sure and cares a lot about her, but he's a very cold, unemotional man.
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A
And also this stepmother who's sort of, you know, a slight element of the wicked stepmother about it, because Mary Shelley grows up to loathe her, but also the stepmother brings with her a daughter called Jane, who basically Mary absolutely loathes.
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She's the worst person ever. I don't blame Mary, Mary said of
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Jane, she had the faculty of making me more uncomfortable than any human being.
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B
I love that love. I really like that.
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A
So Mary, you know, she's very bookish, she reads loads of gothic novels and epistolary novels and stuff growing up, you know, as a teenager. But she's always very much in her father's shadow because her father is always trying to educate her and encourage her to be high minded and stuff. And he's also got this huge kind of contacts book of mates, you know, Samuel Taylor Colderidge and great writers and stuff, who are pitching up at their house and talking about ideas and radical views and the French Revolution and stuff, stuff. So Mary, that's always going on in Mary's head.
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B
I mean, it's an extraordinary environment in which to have been brought up. Some of the greatest minds of that time spent, you Know, were in that house chatting stuff. There's a wonderful story about how once when she was a little girl, she wanted to, she was told to go to bed. But Samuel Taylor Coleridge was reciting the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner which is obviously really, really, really long. And you know, Gordon was trying to get Mary to bed. And then slightly desperately, Coleridge begged that she and Mary's sister were allowed to stay at to hear the rest of it, which I really like. So obviously all of this will have had a massive influence on Mary. And her father attested to the fact that she was very, very clever. He wrote it in a letter to a friend. But he also said that she would make castles in the clouds, which I really, really like. She'd kind of get easily distracted and that she was singularly bold, somewhat imperious and active of mind. So there you go. Her desire of knowledge is great and her perseverance in anything she undertakes almost invincible. So I like that. That's a really, really nice sketch of her.
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A
But then he also added, my daughter is, I believe, very pretty.
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B
Yeah. A bit weird.
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A
You find that a bit weird?
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B
I do, I find that slightly sinister.
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I mean everyone thinks that about their own daughter, don't they?
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Yeah, maybe.
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Anyway, talking about her being very pretty and also Godwin having all these friends and disciples. So when she's in her early to mid teens, it's not exactly clear when, probably about 1812. So she would be 14 or 15. She first sees a bloke who's turned up, he's in his very late teens, probably 19 or 20, who's a huge fan of her father, who is himself a poet, who is himself very sort of hot headed and excitable and romantic and who's himself very radical, so suffused with the idealism of the French Revolution. And this is a young man called Percy Bysshe Shelley, the poet.
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Yeah.
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A
And he's crucially for Godwin, he's rich, isn't he? So he's going to lend Godwin loads of money, which is great for Godwin.
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B
Yeah, he's well born and rich. He's going to inherit a baroness which will make him even richer.
- [25:32]
A
Yeah. And basically he and Mary end up falling in love, which is a slight problem. A because Mary's very young. So when they definitely fall in love, she's 16. The other big problem, he's also married, isn't he? He's married a woman called Harriet who. How old is she?
- [25:47]
B
She's 19 or so.
- [25:49]
A
Yeah. So this is poor from Percy.
- [25:51]
B
Yeah. Especially as Harriet would later go on to drown herself in the Serpentine when she was only 21.
- [25:56]
A
Because of this affair.
- [25:58]
B
Yeah, because Percy left her, you know, by the end of June. She'd basically think of such. There's such a short time now that's passed between Mary and Percy's meeting. Percy Shelley has essentially abandoned her. Even by then. He spent most of his time at the Godwins house, visiting daily. And the two of them, Mary, then Godwin and Percy Shelley, would go on searing hot dates to a graveyard, the graveyard where her mother was buried, to whisper sweet nothings over her grave. And they were. Were always accompanied by their famous third wheel, Mary's loathed stepsister, Jane.
- [26:32]
A
Right. So Jane's now. She's now calling herself Claire, very confusingly.
- [26:36]
B
Yeah. She does go on to rename herself Claire. Finally, on 28 July in 1814, Mary and Percy finally eloped to the continent, obviously, once more accompanied by Jane. Now, at this point, Clare. And there's always been some speculation that that because Jane was. Claire was always there, she and Percy were also lovers. But there's absolutely no evidence to back that up.
- [27:01]
A
Right. The. Percy was carrying on with both of them.
- [27:03]
B
Yeah. Anyway, a bit like that scene in the famous scene in the Graduate when you get to the end of the movie and Dustin Hoffman's character and kind of his love interest are sitting on the bus and they've run away from a wedding. They kind of sit there and they suddenly look kind of a bit depressed and bleak because they've done the shocking thing, the elopement. This tour of Europe turns out to be a total disaster. The three of them are penniless, they travel from place to place friendless. It's just a disaster. It's the worst kind of honeymoon ever. Although, crucially, they are not married because Percy Shelley is still married at this point.
- [27:32]
A
And they end up coming back to England. They've got massive money problems because they're basically debt. Yeah, they're in huge debt. Mary has a child. She has Percy Shelley's child, a girl, but the child dies after only a few days.
- [27:45]
B
This is a tragic part of Mary's life as well.
- [27:48]
A
Yeah, she has a lot of bad luck, right?
- [27:49]
B
Yeah. Of the four children that she has, only one of them survives. And there's this very touching dream that she recounts in her journal about when this first baby dies. And she dreams that she's sitting in front of the fire, holding it, and the baby dies and then she rubs its corpse and the heat of the flames brings it back to life. And there's something kind of very human about that.
- [28:08]
A
Yeah, yeah. But the idea of reanimating somebody who's dead, I mean, you can see why that would be on her mind. And actually talking of that, let's get onto the writing of the book.
- [28:17]
B
Yeah, iconic.
- [28:18]
A
So, basically, they go back to Europe, don't they? She has a son called William at the beginning of 1816, and they, after that, decide they'll go back to Europe. They go to Geneva in Switzerland and they meet up with Shelley's. Another of Shelley's great heroes, another Romantic poet, Lord Byron.
- [28:37]
B
Yeah.
- [28:37]
A
Who is staying at Villa Diodati on the shores of the lake. An extra little frisson here because Claire, formerly Jane, is now having an affair with Byron. So there's a real sort of menagerie. Yeah. Kind of feel to this.
- [28:56]
B
It's all you would expect of the Romantic poets.
- [28:58]
A
It is. They're on the lake, but it's actually fun at first. They're going, having parties outside, they're going swimming and whatever. But 1816, notoriously, is the year without a summer. There's been a volcanic eruption in the Dutch East Indies, as they would then were, and that means there's basically no summer. It's very wet and cold and stormy. And so actually is the. As the weeks pass, they spend an awful lot of them cooped up inside in this villa and they've got nothing to do. And this is the context for the writing of Frankenstein.
- [29:25]
B
Yeah, it's absolutely wonderful. So at night, they've been sitting around reading loads of German ghost stories, and one evening, Byron and I think, this is a brilliant idea. Byron says, well, to pass the time, let's all try to write our own ghost story. So they all have a go. Shelley, Percy Shelley starts by writing a story about himself. And that fizzles out, right? Byron then starts telling a story about a vampire, which his friend and Dr. John Polidori, who's also there, later adapts and turns into a short story called the Vampire. And then Mary is desperate to, and I quote, make it to write a tale that makes the reader dread to look around, to curdle the blood and quicken the beatings of the heart. But nothing comes to her. She. She can't think of anything. And every day they ask her, where's your story, Mary? And she's like, oh, I still don't have one.
- [30:12]
A
Yeah, she's got it, isn't she? Because she literally says, you know, they would say, have you thought of a story. And each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative. Because she wants something really good and she doesn't want to just phone it in.
- [30:24]
B
Yeah, she wants to be equals with them as well, I think.
- [30:27]
A
Of course, she's young and they're much older, and she's a woman, and she doesn't want to be patronized by these, frankly, very. I find them very annoying.
- [30:34]
B
I don't.
- [30:35]
A
Romantic poets. But at one point, she's listening to Percy and Byron and they're whittering on about science and about the principles. Principles of life. And basically they say, we'll talk about this in the second half about the scientific ideas behind Frankenstein. They say, you know what? Where does life come from? How can you animate it? Could it be something to do with electricity? Could you. With galvanic experiments, could you manufacture a creature and. And give it life somehow? And she listens to them talking about this, and then she goes to bed and she basically has a waking nightmare, doesn't she? She can't sleep, so it's not like she's asleep. It's. But. But her mind is. Is. Is running amok. And she has this vision. Tell us about the vision.
- [31:17]
B
Oh, it's wonderful. She sees this pale. She calls it a 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 horror, half vital motion. So you can see right there from the start that she sees this as something that's dangerous, which is the opposite from Byron and Shelley, who are excited by this idea, the idea of mankind being able to engineer life. And she also writes, frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the creator of the world. So she's frightened by it, by this vision that she has of a pale student creating a terrifying monster. And she says, you know, she thinks that the student would be terrified of what he has created. Totally understandably, because the student.
- [32:18]
A
It's really interesting, Byron and Shelley, you know, among the Romantic poets, it was fashionable to affect a kind of atheism and a kind of cynicism and whatnot. But, you know, the teenage Mary Shelley is saying, to mock God, to play God. Gosh, that would be overwhelming and terrifying and awful, and you would be appalled by the consequences of what you had done. And she says, the artist would surely. And it's Interesting, because she calls it the artist rather than the scientist. The artist would rush away from his odious handiwork. And she imagines that the artist asleep, and then the curtains of his bedside opening, and these yellow, watery, but speculative eyes of the creature staring down at him. And this is the inspiration for the story.
- [33:01]
B
I love that origin story. And it's actually true. You know, there are so many myths around about how people write, write legendary books, but it's actually true. She records it in her own journal. It's. It's brilliant. So she says, 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 specter which had haunted my midnight pillow. So there you go. She's got the ghost story to tell. Byron, Shelley and the rest of them.
- [33:27]
A
Yeah. So she tells them the story, doesn't. She starts writing it down.
- [33:30]
B
Yeah.
- [33:30]
A
And she starts with the words, it was a dreary night of November.
- [33:34]
B
Yeah.
- [33:34]
A
Which actually. Actually, that's basically. She uses that exact phrase in the book. And at first she thinks, oh, this will just be a short story. But actually they say, God, what a brilliant story this is. This is incredible. And Shelley says, oh, I think you should turn this into a novel. You know, there's definitely a book in this, and this is what she does. And so when they go back to England, she's working on the book, and in 1818, Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus. Again, we'll talk about this Prometheus aspect Crucial subtitle this is published anonymously. She doesn't tell anybody that she's done it. And actually, do you know what? The reviews aren't very good, are they? People don't like it.
- [34:09]
B
I know. They actually, a lot of them reminded me of the reviews for Wuthering Heights, which we did a couple of weeks ago. They. They kind of say that it's almost immoral. They basically say it's kind of. It's fiendish and outrageous.
- [34:21]
A
Yeah.
- [34:22]
B
There's one wonderful review by a guy called William Beckford.
- [34:26]
A
Gothic writer.
- [34:26]
B
Yeah, a Gothic writer. So, I mean, that's quite telling in itself. He doesn't acknowledge this as kind of a Gothic work, but he writes, this is perhaps the foulest toadstool that has yet sprung up from the reeking dunghill of the present times. So.
- [34:40]
A
Ouch. Yeah. I've had worse reviews than that, though, to be fair.
- [34:43]
B
But on the plus side, Walter Scott is actually quite positive about it, and he's a huge Inspiration for Mary as he is to, you know, Emily Bronte. Similar kind of genre. Anyway, the key takeaway from all these reviews is they don't know that Mary Shelley has written it. So they assume that it must have been written by either her kind of legendary father, this famous radical, or. Or her husband, another famous radical.
- [35:07]
A
Yeah, Percy. Yeah.
- [35:08]
B
Yeah, exactly. And then it's only in the edition, the second edition that comes out in 1823, that they realise it was written by a woman and they're absolutely shocked by this. And this shockingly patronizing line is written in Blackwoods. For a man it was excellent, but for a woman it was wonderful. Blackwood's let itself down there.
- [35:26]
A
Yeah. It's so coming from a woman, it's really good. Wow. Well done you, Mary. Well done, you.
- [35:31]
B
But, you see, there's a lot of controversy at the time about. And speculation about whether or not Mary Shelley actually wrote. Wrote it or, you know, it was kind of her hand was guided by the two main men in her life.
- [35:41]
A
And I think, actually you still see this even now. I actually saw somebody writing about this on social media, actually, about a week ago, saying, you know, obviously, Percy Shelley wrote Frankenstein. It's obviously nonsense that Mary wrote it. I mean, this is rubbish.
- [35:52]
B
Yeah, we're gonna put the record straight once and for all.
- [35:55]
A
Totally. So in we have the evidence of her journals, we have the evidence of Byron writing about it. Byron says it was a wonderful work for a girl of 19. Now, that is patronizing and condescending, but at least Byron is admitting that she wrote it, not his mate.
- [36:10]
B
And for Byron, who is often quite rude about women. Yeah, that is high praise indeed.
- [36:15]
A
But also, I've been to. In the. In the Bodleian Library in Oxford, they have the manuscript of Frankenstein. They have the handwritten manuscript, and I've seen it because I was filmed with it for a series about science fiction on the BBC about 10 years ago. If you look at the manuscript, the handwritten, you can see Shelley's suggestions, his notes, and you can see where Mary has ignored them and you can see all the stuff written in her own hand.
- [36:37]
B
Yeah, Shelley definitely advised, helped her all the way through the process. But it is her work and it is her words and it is her writing. But there is one way in which Percy Shelley had a massive impact upon Frankenstein, and that is in the character of Victor Frankenstein himself, because there's a lot to suggest that Percy Shelley was kind of the original model for Frankenstein. Yeah, a lot of the characters that Percy Shelley writes about in his Own writing and poetry. They are themselves kind of excellent characters. They fly too close to the sun, they're overreaching, they're really ambitious. They're really invested in the idea of themselves as kind of creative forces and the creative powers within them. This is very poor from Percy Shelley, but when he was younger and a child, he would call himself Victory, which.
- [37:23]
A
Nice.
- [37:23]
B
Yeah, yeah. You did that too, didn't you?
- [37:27]
A
Always.
- [37:27]
B
Yeah, always.
- [37:28]
A
Still do, deep down. Yeah.
- [37:30]
B
Victory. Sam Stanbrook, the Conqueror. Yeah, I like it. It sounds right. But this is what Mary Shelley was originally gonna call Victor Frankenstein.
- [37:39]
A
Oh, right. She was gonna call him Victory.
- [37:41]
B
Victory. Yeah, she was gonna call him Victory, like Frankenstein. Victor Frankenstein. Percy Shelley was obsessed with the natural world, as all Romantic poets are, and he had this habit, which is kind of ironic, given that he later drowned in a boat, but he had this habit of lying at the bottom of boats and looking up at the clouds, and it would kind of make him think and give him peace. And that's exactly what Victor Frankenstein does in Frankenstein.
- [38:04]
A
And also, Percy was a. I mean, I remember doing a thing on the Rest Is History, another podcast. I mean, who's ever heard of that podcast? No, which I. I can remember your very first episode, Tabby, when you were producing, was about boarding schools and how people would pursue Shelley around Eaton, shouting, the Shelly. The Shelly. They'd go on Shelly Hunts and try to beat him up. And one reason was that he was too interested in science, which they thought was weird.
- [38:30]
B
Yeah, he was a science nerd. Which people wouldn't think when they think about Romantic poets, because they're often kind of juxtaposed, aren't they? Science and Romanticism.
- [38:38]
A
Yeah, they're seen as. As polar opposites, but actually, the Romantics were very interested in science. Shelley, when he was at Eton, then at Oxford, he'd be almost like, have, like, batteries coming out of his pockets or something. Been doing an electric experiment or whatever, stuff like that. Yeah, What a funster he was.
- [38:53]
B
But the weird thing is, a friend of his has wrote an account of the kind of experiments they used to conduct, and they bear a weird resemblance to the way that the creature's birth and creation is portrayed in the movies that have been done of Frankenstein, because it's all about kind of big jars full of water and electricity and batteries and stuff. You know, he charged. A friend writes, he charged the battery of several large jars, laboring with vast energy and discoursing with increasing vehemence of the marvelous powers of electricity. He speaks about thunder and lightning and how how channeling this thunder and lightning into the water or whatever it is, would create something marvelous. And that is. So that's. That looks exactly how you imagine the creature's birth.
- [39:33]
A
But it also captures the curiosity, the vision, the ambition, the excitement of science and indeed of anybody interested in the kind of the world of the intellect in the 1790s and 1800s. You know, this sense that you're kind of breaking through frontiers of understanding and leading mankind into this wonderful new age. And that vision is so central to Victor Frankenstein's sense of what he's doing when he makes the creature.
- [39:58]
B
It totally, totally is, but ironically bears very little resemblance to that scene. The idea of jars, lightning, thunder, bears very little resemblance to the creature's birth in Frankenstein itself. And we will touch on that later.
- [40:12]
A
So we've probably had enough about Mary and Percy, because I think what listeners really want is they want Victor Frankenstein as a monster. No. Yeah, Right. So after the break, we will discuss the question that haunts the producers of this show. Which one is the real monster? We'll find out after the break.
- [40:31]
B
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- [40:57]
A
It's Maybelline.
- [40:59]
B
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- [41:43]
A
It is an honor to share.
- [41:44]
B
No, it's our honor.
- [41:46]
A
It is a larger honor.
- [41:48]
B
No, really, stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side
- [41:57]
A
and participate in McDonald's while supplies last.
- [42:03]
B
Welcome back to the book club. Now, Dominic, at the break, you were telling us all how hurt you had been by some of the comparisons that we made in the first half of this episode. So going forwards, I will restrain from comparing you to Victor Frankenstein.
- [42:17]
A
Yeah. It was very, very hurtful to be.
- [42:19]
B
I know, I know. You were practically crying to our producers. But I have one final request to make of you in the guise of Victor Frankenstein.
- [42:27]
A
Yeah.
- [42:28]
B
Would you please use your scientific powers to bring the man, the myth, the legend that is Victor Frankenstein and his monstrous creation back to life?
- [42:38]
A
Okay. Well, this is brilliant badinage.
- [42:40]
B
It is.
- [42:40]
A
So let's start. Actually, let's start not with Victor, but counterintuitively with his monster. Because, to be honest, when people think about Frankenstein, it's the monster that they actually think of first, isn't it?
- [42:51]
B
Undoubtedly. Yeah.
- [42:53]
A
So he is born in the lab. So if you've seen the films, you can imagine the electricity fizzing rather like a repartee in this episode.
- [43:01]
B
Yeah, just as animated.
- [43:02]
A
Just as animated, exactly. And actually in the. There is no electricity fizzing. It is much a sort of darker, more intimate scene. And actually, Tabby, why don't you read, remind listeners of this, of this scene, because it's the sort of physicality of it, but also the shock of Victor when he sees the monster. It's one of the most memorable scenes in the book.
- [43:21]
B
But we should also say that we don't see anything to do with the practicalities involved in his creation. Everything, all of that happens off stage. There's no allusion to vast jars full of green liquid or anything like we come in from the moment that the creature is born. So he says, how can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe? Or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful. Great God. His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath. His hair was of a lustrous black and flowing, his teeth of pearly whiteness. But these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips.
- [44:14]
A
Yeah. So he has chosen. I mean, Victor thought the creature was going to be beautiful. He chose his features accordingly. But a really important point is something that Victor, and indeed Mary Shelley hammer home again and again. He is utterly repulsive. When left in no doubt whatsoever that this creature is absolutely repugnant, you see it and you are repelled. So when he comes into the boat. Towards the end of the book, Captain Walton says he was gigantic in stature, yet distorted and uncouth in proportions. I mean, he's not unlike the orcs in the Lord of the Rings. In Tolkien's vision, which is, again, of a kind of distorted, perverted humanity, that's what the Creature is. And yet, one of the key things about the Creature that I think the Hollywood Frankenstein obviously completely misses is this. He is articulate, he's sensitive, he's very well spoken, he's thoughtful, he's reflective, he's curious. You know, Tabby, you're actually a big fan of the Creature, aren't you?
- [45:13]
B
I am. I'm a massive fan of the Creature. I see myself in him, frankly.
- [45:17]
A
Wow.
- [45:17]
B
Because he is very, very intelligent. He learns at a ridiculously fast rate. He is contemplative, he's fiercely curious. He's actually very gentle at the beginning of his life. He's really, really thoughtful and rational, actually. And the seven senses central chapters of Frankenstein, which are the Creature telling his story, they're kind of the moral heart of the book. They provide the moral underpinning to the whole story. And interestingly, that is the bit that is always cut out of movie adaptations, because I think people find it a bit boring, but also because it's the part of the novel that humanizes the monster. It turns him into kind of a thinking, feeling being. Because the thing is, though, he looks like a monster. Through learning, through eavesdropping on this fan, he develops the emotions and the moral compass of a human. And he feels like. Like a human.
- [46:12]
A
Yes, he absolutely does.
- [46:13]
B
And so I think that by putting those chapters on screen, you don't get the hammer, horror, monster, short cropped hair bolt that maybe you're going for. You get like a, you know, a really interesting, quite sympathetic person almost.
- [46:31]
A
Of course you do. Absolutely you do. I mean, I think when you end those chapters, you get Mary Shelley's, a lot of her philosophical vision, a lot of her vision for the character, what she's actually trying to say. So when he wakes, he's fled the lab. His creator, he doesn't know who his creator is or why his creator has
- [46:45]
B
abandoned him or why he's there. Like, we all kind of slightly want to know why we exist. Of course, it's what inspires people to kind of look to God or whatever it may be, but he has no idea.
- [46:56]
A
Yeah. This is getting to the humanity of the creature, to his essential humanity. The creature wakes in the forest like man in the Garden of Eden. He Looks around with wonder. He goes in search of berries.
- [47:06]
B
He.
- [47:07]
A
He's. He's naked and he finds a cloak and he clothes himself. He is delighted by what he hears. He tries to imitate the singing of the birds. And so sweet.
- [47:18]
B
It's childlike, actually.
- [47:19]
A
It is childlike, exactly. He's like a child, you know, awaking into life. And then he sees this family, the people who live in the cottage, the cottages, and he. He thinks they're wonderful and he wants to emulate them. But this very, very sad scene. He looks in a pool and he starts back in horror. I was unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror. Because he's so loathsome and horrible. Basically, it's like what I feel like when I look in the mirror. Tabby. I know he's got my fragile self esteem.
- [47:49]
B
You are nothing but a sensitive Frankenstein's monster.
- [47:52]
A
Thank you.
- [47:53]
B
But that also echoes the Garden of Eden. You know, when Adam and Eve become self aware and they try to cover themselves with fig leaves.
- [47:58]
A
Exactly. And he curses the self awareness that comes with knowledge. And he says at one point, oh, that I had forever remained in my native wood, nor known, nor felt beyond the sensations of hunger, thirst and heat. In other words, the more I know about myself and the world, the unhappier I become.
- [48:15]
B
And as we said, that's, that's very, very Rousseau, a Genevan philosopher. So no coincidence that large swathes of this book are set in Geneva because he idealizes the innocence, you know, innocence and nature. He believed that humans were, as you said, born good, born innocent, but society and institutions corrupt. And Rousseau was a massive influence on Mary's father, Godwin, who also believed that institutions crafted by human society were destructive forces and ruined the human heart, the human soul. So these chapters are just, they're just pure Rousseau. A state of innocence, the Garden of Eden. The more the monster learns, the more corrupted he becomes.
- [48:59]
A
Yeah, I mean, the monster has begun life as basically a member of the Green Party. He's eating berries, he's being kind, he's. He's got very poor self esteem. All of those kinds of things that we associate with members of the Green Party. And, and then he becomes evil. So he, he crosses the political spectrum
- [49:20]
B
and he becomes, yeah, he becomes a member of reform.
- [49:23]
A
Oh, Tabby, you can't believe that. I've thrown away. You've thrown away. She's, she's literally, to our reform voting listeners, I mean, I, you know, distance
- [49:30]
B
myself from Tabby's remarks and I apologize to Our three Green Party listeners.
- [49:35]
A
Right. I mean, we've got three members who had three listeners who are all members of the Green Party. What a coincidence that 50% of our audience would be Green Party members. Anyway, he becomes evil, he does become corrupted. And because he becomes a killer of women and children, I mean, he's literally a child murderer.
- [49:50]
B
That is definitely, definitely not something that you can defend the creature on. He springs to violence so quickly and so instinctively. And actually, one of the things that I really came away from reading this again was, was the sensation of those hands around a neck. You know, his strangulation of his victims is terrible and terrifying. But having said that, he's not just a pantomime villain. He's conflicted, he's full of remorse for the murders that he commits. And he says of himself that he is a wretch. And that's definitely not what you get in kind of the classic horror films in which he plays a big part and that makes him pitiable.
- [50:27]
A
Yeah, he's got a self loathing.
- [50:28]
B
He's the eternal outcast. Yeah, yeah.
- [50:31]
A
One of the most moving things about the creature, actually, is that is very human feeling, which is his feeling of loneliness, of isolation. Frankenstein's monster doesn't even have a name, which is sad.
- [50:40]
B
No, exactly.
- [50:41]
A
The fact that everyone calls him Frankenstein, I mean, that's the ultimate. That would be gutting for the monster.
- [50:45]
B
Oh, of course it would. I mean, it's like he doesn't have an identity. His identity is only his creator and his creator doesn't even want him. So because of all that, and in spite of his appalling violence, I did really pity the monster at the end of it all.
- [50:59]
A
Yeah. And the monster obviously does have a forerunner. He has a model who has a very famous name. So the title page of the book is a. Has a quotation From John Milton's 17th century epic poem, Paradise Lost, one of
- [51:11]
B
my favorite poems ever. I love it.
- [51:13]
A
Wow. Really?
- [51:14]
B
Yeah.
- [51:15]
A
I'm very impressed. I've never read. I've never read the whole of Paradise
- [51:18]
B
Lost, so I want to do on the show one day.
- [51:20]
A
Yeah, we should.
- [51:20]
B
Anyway, we digress.
- [51:21]
A
So the quotation runs as follows. Did I request the maker from my clay to mold me, man? Did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me? And basically, this is. This is Adam, the first man talking to God in the Garden of Eden, saying, did I ask you to make me from clay? Did I ask you to awaken me from darkness? Now, Mary, you know, she loved Paradise Lost like you, Tabby she read it twice, in 1815 and 1816. John Milton had actually stayed at the villa, the Villa de. On the banks of Lake Geneva where they were staying when she comes up with the story. And the theme of Adam and God runs right through the book. The monster himself alludes to it at one point. One point. So he steals Paradise Lost from the cottages. He reads it and he says, I am basically a worse version of Adam. Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence. But then he says, the difference between me and Adam. Adam was created by God. It's perfect, happy and prosperous, guarded by the special care of his creator. But I am wretched, helpless and alone. I have no creator looking after me as. As Adam did.
- [52:26]
B
Yeah. So, I mean, in that he's kind of like a Manich European Adam, who is a different version of the Adam in the Bible, but he chastises his Maker for making him, rather than kind of being grateful. But there are other points in the novel where he's compared to another character in Paradise Lost, and that is Satan. He actually refers to himself time and time again as a fiend. And Satan is the angel in Paradise Lost, the former angel who falls from heaven because he rebels and therefore lives out his life in hell. He lives in hell. And the creature actually says, many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition, for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me. And that ambiguity is undoubtedly central to the book. You know, is the creature an innocent Adam, or a cruel and vindictive or certainly rebellious Satan? You know, is he the first man Adam, which would make him like us? Or is he the Devil, essentially?
- [53:24]
A
I agree. This is the ambiguity that has been so enduring about Frankenstein. To me, it's actually. Actually in some ways, the deeper meaning of the story, that it's not just a story about man playing God, which would be, you know, a man pretending to be God and the creature as some terrible aberration. I think the idea that the creature is us and Victor is God or Victor, you know, that. That this. The story is man's horror and rage and resentment at his own creator. And that's the idea that so many science fiction, fiction, you know, let's think of Blade Runner, for example. Yeah, Blade Runner. The replicants, their. Their fury at their own creator, you know, who's made them and put them in the world, and they have a shelf life, and which will. And they will expire. Their horror at their condition clearly Echoes the creatures feelings of incomprehension and alienation and abandonment and whatnot from Victor.
- [54:19]
B
It's interesting though, I. It occurs that Mary Shelley must have a very cynical view then of humanity and the human heart, because it implies that man corrupts man. And, you know, the longer that we live among humans, the kind of fouler and more degenerate we become.
- [54:35]
A
But in a way, that's her father and his ideas about institutions corrupting us and whatnot. Yeah, I mean, these radicals, they had this sort of idealized view of human innocence, but at the same time they believe that the world was fallen. You know, they're obsessed with all the things that are wrong with them world and all the inequality and all the injustice and whatnot and all the things that we had that the. The prison we have built for ourselves, I guess.
- [54:57]
B
Yeah. But it's interesting then, because if the monster, therefore is man, is us in the story, what then does that make Victor? Is he God or is he emblematic of human institutions? So, I mean, I think this is a good point for us to talk a little bit about Victor, because he's. His name is probably the most famous part of this novel. But people very rarely know much about him. They just think of the monster.
- [55:21]
A
Yeah, we don't even get a description of him. Right.
- [55:23]
B
No physical description. He's just described as having wild eyes, which is why I think Oscar Isaac was a very, very good choice for him physically. Also, the way that he played him is very controlling and proud and kind of bent on his own selfish ends. Because Victor Frankenstein in the novel, he's not entirely likable. He's incredibly ambitious. He's a bit of a glory seeker. Seeker. His name, Victor, points to that. His creature describes him as self devoted. And I think he is. I think he's a very selfish man. He never considers for a moment that his creation might do bad rather than entirely doing good. You know, he thinks of himself as a bit of a savior, and he doesn't think much about what he has done, think much about how his creature has destroyed his family. Yes, he feels very guilty about what his creature does, but he doesn't stay with his family and kind of mourn with them. He's just constantly running off to chase the creature again.
- [56:12]
A
Well, the creature lives in his head rent free. Right. I mean, he's obsessed with the creature, but he is.
- [56:17]
B
He's definitely brave, he is loving. And I think those elements of him, this pathos, makes him kind of a tragic figure, a bit like a figure from Aeschylus or something like that. Rather than entirely evil, there's this element
- [56:31]
A
of the Greek tragedy about him undone by his own. By his own hubris, I guess. Yeah. But there is. I mean, you talk about Victor and his family. There's one relationship that he completely neglects, and that's the paternal relationship between. Because he never feels any responsibility towards his creature. He never shows the creature any mercy or compassion. He's maddened with hatred. He talks about his abhorrence of the creature. He says, you know, my hatred and revenge burst all bounds in moderation. Victor feels guilt about creating the creature, but he doesn't feel any obligation to the creature. And. And actually, you could argue Victor is its father.
- [57:06]
B
Yeah.
- [57:07]
A
And Victor, Strong, should embrace it. I mean, that's what the creature wants, right?
- [57:10]
B
Yeah. I mean, if Victor is God, people always refer. You know, Christians always refer to God as. As the father. I think one of the things that Mary Shelley is saying, she's not just warning of kind of unchecked ambition or the depths that science might plunder in the world. I think she's also saying that if we do, if humanity does use science to create, we have to be shepherds of our creation. You know, we are responsible for it. And Victor neglects his creation entirely from the moment of its birth.
- [57:41]
A
I mean, that famous scene where they confront each other on the glacier for the first time, and the creature is telling Victor his story. The creature says to Victor, I'm asking, basically, I'm asking you for recognition and affection. You, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature. Do your duty towards me and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. And then Victor, rejected, rejects him and says, you know, I'm not interested in you. You're horrible, you're a terrible person, whatever. And then I think, actually quite moving lines. The creature says, oh, Frankenstein, remember, I am thy creature. I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Make me happy and I shall again be virtuous.
- [58:23]
B
Yeah.
- [58:23]
A
And that basically, is the creature's story in a nutshell. He's desperate for a father. He says, I was born good, but I've been driven to evil. I've been made vengeful. Please show me. Show me a crumb of affection and then I'll be a good person. And Victor can never bring himself to do it.
- [58:38]
B
But the book isn't just about the responsibility of the creator. It's also about hubris and humility. So this introduces another major theme, which is the Consequences of man playing God and kind of unleashing his creation upon the world. You know, terrible force of destruction.
- [58:56]
A
Yeah. And this is made very obvious in the subtitle, which is the modern Prometheus. So in many ways, this is one of the real keys to the book. The idea of Prometheus, that's. Abby, you're the classicist. So Prometheus. You're all over Prometheus, I assume.
- [59:08]
B
Yeah. Love it, love it. So there are two Prometheus myths. There's the one that's more famous from Greek mythology, in which the Titan Prometheus steals fire from the Olympian gods and gives it to man, who he has modelled out of clay. Both Byron and Shelley loved this version of it and turned Prometheus into a romantic hero. But then there's another later edition of the story from Ovid, and we know that Mary had been reading Metamorphoses in 1815. And this is a Prometheus who kind of manipulated men into life from clay. So in this sense, Frankenstein's a very Promethean figure. He's a maker of men. And while Prometheus in. In that version of the story does it with magic, Victor obviously uses science, which is obviously music to your ears, isn't it, Dominic?
- [59:54]
A
Yes, exactly.
- [59:54]
B
You just love science.
- [59:55]
A
I absolutely love science. I think actually this book is a warning about what happens if you take an unhealthy interest in science. Nothing.
- [60:01]
B
Good. That's a comfort to me because I take very little interest in science.
- [60:04]
A
Yeah, great. Well, this is one of the. I mean, this is. This is why we're a good team, because neither of us knows anything about science.
- [60:09]
B
Yeah. We complement each other in that way.
- [60:11]
A
So Victor is a boy, like Percy Shelley, obsessed with chemistry, all of this kind of thing. Wants to learn the secrets of heaven and earth. He's very clearly reflecting the mood of the late 18th, early 19th century, the Enlightenment. This idea of. Of curiosity, of progress and so on. And, you know, they would have these arguments. People would have these arguments. They're so common at the time. People have them publicly in the newspapers or whatever. Whatever. What is life? What makes life different from death? Does it have anything to do with electricity? Is there some sort of spark that animates the body, like an. Like an electric current? And you can see all of that reflected in the book.
- [60:44]
B
Yeah, you totally can. And we know that Mary Shelley was fascinated by these arguments because she would often attend lectures on them. Anyway, there were all kinds of experiments going on in the 1780s and 90s and 1800s. To see if you could bring a corpse back to life. You know, it's so interesting that the minute that Hughes human science advanced enough, the first question to spring into people's minds was life animation. Like, what gave us all life? Anyway, so they started digging into this a bit, and they tried to see if you could bring corpses back to life using electricity, which had recently been discovered. And you can see why this would interest someone like Mary Shelley, who'd been afflicted by death her whole life, and then remember again the dream that she had about warmth, bringing her baby back to. To life. So in 1781, I never thought I'd be giving a science lecture. In 1781, an Italian surgeon was dissecting a frog and next to some big static electricity machine.
- [61:42]
A
How did that machine work? Do you want to explain how the static electricity machine worked?
- [61:45]
B
I could, but I don't feel like it because I've got a lot to say about, you know, books and stuff. So just. Right. Yeah, I'll tell you after.
- [61:51]
A
Thanks.
- [61:52]
B
I'll tell you after. Anyway, so. Because this scalpel was near this big, you know, electric machine when he started. When he put it on the frog's leg, the frog's leg started twitching, right. And, you know, this was huge. And then his nephew, a guy called Aldini, took it a whole lot further, a whole lot further in 1801, and what he would do is he would tour Europe and he would publicly try to animate the corpses of murderers or for criminals using electricity. And this is so Victor Frankenstein, because if you read the reports that Aldini wrote about these experiments, and I did read a little bit of one, there's this kind of creepy. The same creepy relish in his. The way he describes these very gory experiments as. Victor has the fanatical, you know, scientific twinkle, but then one day, he inserted metal rods into the jaw of one criminal and the corpse. The jaw of the corpse began to quiver and contort and its left eye actually opened. This scene is done brilliantly in Guillermo del Toro's new movie, I have to say. So there we have it in real life, the origin of the experiment that Victor Frankenstein conducts to bring his monster to life. But obviously, it's much, much more literal in the book. We never get anything this direct.
- [63:08]
A
Yeah. Because we don't really see all this. I have to say, that would be kind of interesting to see.
- [63:13]
B
Oh, totally. It would.
- [63:14]
A
Yeah. I mean, I know it sounds a bit gory and a bit macabre, but I would be interested in. I mean, I'M sorry, I'm giving myself away here, but I would actually pay good money to see people.
- [63:22]
B
It's interesting, though, it made me wonder, do you think there are still kind of scientific experiments going on in the world where people, scientists are desperately trying to do this? Because it's funny that we started at the very beginning, you know, huge strides in science, let's bring people back to life. But you don't hear a lot about that these days when we've come a whole lot further. I don't know, it just made me wonder.
- [63:39]
A
No, you very rarely read about scientists trying to bring back people by shoving metal rods into their jaw.
- [63:46]
B
I feel like in that sense, we've digressed, We've regressed.
- [63:49]
A
We've regressed. We've gone backwards.
- [63:50]
B
We've gone backwards.
- [63:52]
A
Well, anyway, I guess the point that, for Mary Shelley, though that's so interesting, is that she thinks all of this is so dangerous that she is not as enthused about it as so many people are. Because for her, Victor's enthusiasm for this and his thirst for knowledge and his thirst for kind of mastery over the laws of nature.
- [64:11]
B
Plundering nature.
- [64:12]
A
Yeah. She finds this abhorrent and she thinks this will have terrible consequences both for Victor and for society, for humanity at large. And in that sense, you know, again, you can see how this foreshadows so many of the warnings that you get in modern contemporary science fiction that our hubris, our enthusiasm for science is what will destroy us.
- [64:35]
B
Yeah. And also obsession, Victor's thoughtless obsession is a massive red flag in the book. But as you mentioned earlier, thinking about the influence of this on later fiction, not even just science fiction, you can see a lot of this in Lord of the Rings, can't you? Kind of the wizard Saman plundering Middle Earth.
- [64:56]
A
Yeah, completely. So I was thinking there's a bit at the beginning of the book when Robert Walton, so even Robert Walton, the guy who's telling us the story, the sort of sea captain, he says to Victor, you know, I'm really desperate to find the North Pole. And he says, how gladly I would sacrifice my fortune, my existence, my every hope for the furtherance of my enterprise. Enterprise. And he says, life and death is nothing to me because what I want is the knowledge, the dominion I should acquire and transmit over the elemental foes of our race, the elemental foes being the laws of nature and whatnot. And that is the kind of thing that you can imagine one of Tolkien's villains, Saraman, Sauron, whatever, or any mad scientist in Any number of films saying that the threat here is not so much, I think, science per se. No, it's arrogance. It's the thirst for mastery and for knowledge at any cost. Which is, again, it's a very Tolkienian, if that's a word, which it isn't sort of theme.
- [65:49]
B
But you know what else it reminded me of? Having recently watched the finale. It reminded me of Stranger Things. But not just. Yeah, totally, it did, you know, mad scientists plundering the laws of nature and as a result, unleashing unforeseen dark terrors on the world. It's also very Jurassic Park. It's very Terminator. Because Victor's initial intention in creating the monsters, so he says, is to find cures for diseases. Just as for Aldini. Aldini said that his. The reason that he was conducting his experiments was to save people from drowning, to bring people from drowning back to life. But people even say that of AI today. You know, they say it'll change the world. Not necessarily for the better, but it's all okay because it will revolutionize medicine and that will save lives. So that you just gotta. It's just a. It's extraordinary what Mary Shelley was doing when she wrote this. The precedent that she set, like these ideas were totally original when she was writing this book.
- [66:41]
A
Yeah. It's what makes it so foundational. It's what makes it, I think, without any question, one of the two or three foundational science fiction texts. Because so much of science fiction. Science fiction tends to ask what if? But science fiction also, you know, a huge theme of it is what we do with our power and our knowledge and. And how far will we go and how much will we destroy in the sort of pursuit of progress.
- [67:07]
B
Yeah.
- [67:07]
A
And Frankenstein and the idea of creating life. I mean, so any story about a sentiment. Sentient robot or a computer that comes to life or a creation or some, you know, advance that humanity has made that ends up having disastrous consequences. They all, at some level, I think, come back to this book written by this. Effectively by this teenager.
- [67:28]
B
Yeah.
- [67:29]
A
On a miserable holiday with the rain pouring down outside to basically try and entertain her slightly annoying mates.
- [67:35]
B
Yeah. And her ghastly stepsister looking on. But it is. It is not just a trailblazing science fiction novel. It's also more retro than that because it's also undoubtedly a romantic novel. You know, it's full of scenes of nature, the bliss, the sublime bliss of nature, the healing force of nature. That's very, very romantic. And also the romantic movement believed that you could shock it's all about emotion. It's a very emotional book.
- [68:00]
A
Yeah.
- [68:00]
B
But they believe that you could shock emotion out of people, and that was important. And some of the more chilling scenes in the novel do just that. You know, the idea of this terrifying monster with its hands around a small boy's neck, the idea of an animating life. But it's not just that. It's also very much a Gothic novel. And you mentioned how Mary Shelley was reading a lot of Gothic fiction. She read it all throughout her life, but also around the time that she was writing Frankenstein books like the Mysteries of Udolpho, the Monk. These are the Gothic novels of the period.
- [68:27]
A
Yeah, the canonical Gothic novels, exactly.
- [68:29]
B
And this book is just. It's full of the Gothic, full of suspense, full of storms and sudden appearances, isolated, gloomy settings, graveyards, charnel houses, the psychological torment of Franklin Frankenstein and, well, sort of pretty much all the characters in the book. The. The relentless pursuit by Frankenstein of his creature. This is all very, very Gothic. But having said that, it is far more pensive, it is far more ideological, it's far more philosophical than most Gothic novels are. It's not driven by plot, it's driven more by ideas.
- [69:01]
A
Yeah, I think that's definitely true. It's driven more by ideas than by plot. And I think it's the blend of those three things that makes it so remarkable as a book. Yeah, that is clearly a rare romantic element to it. There is clearly this sort of supernatural, haunted. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff in Graveyards and all of that.
- [69:15]
B
They always play that up in the movies.
- [69:16]
A
Yeah, that draws. So the films often do draw on the Gothic element very heavily, but I think it's the. To me, the most enduring elements is definitely the science, the more philosophical science fiction one, and that's why I think it lives on. Those Gothic books that you mentioned, the Mistress of Adolfo or the Monk, nobody reads them now, and I'm guessing the majority of them, our listeners, have never really heard of them. Yeah, Frankenstein, if it were merely a Gothic novel, would be forgotten. But I think it's the ideas and the science fiction element that have ensured its kind of place in the popular imagination. The idea of, you know, what are the moral costs of. Of the pursuit of knowledge? What responsibility do we have to our creations? The idea of the creator who is undone by his own hubris and whatnot, all of that kind of stuff. I think that's why it lives on.
- [70:00]
B
And the twisted progeny as well. I mean, you can see. See that in anything from Edward the Scissorhands to Ex Machina. But I do also think it's that it's the science fiction element of it, but wedded to kind of the soulfulness, the tender soulfulness of the Romantics. I love that. Some of my favorite passages in Frankenstein are the kind of reflections on the natural world, but then wedded to this dark, you know, shocking creator, scientific element. And I think that's why you can also see its influence in books like Nevertheless Let Me Go, which is so thoughtful and emotive and sort of moving.
- [70:38]
A
Yeah. Melancholy. There's a melancholy to it, right?
- [70:40]
B
Yeah, there's a huge melancholy to it, which I think is very romantic. But then, you know, wedded to the fact that Never Let Me Go is about creatures kind of.
- [70:50]
A
But they're searching for their creator too, aren't they?
- [70:52]
B
Suffering as a result of their creators. Yeah, exactly.
- [70:55]
A
So we should wrap up by talking very quickly about Mary Shelley. So Percy's drowned in a boating accident, didn't he, in 1822. And that basically was. That was a trauma from which, in many ways, she never really recovered. She was devastated by that.
- [71:07]
B
Yeah. She kept his ashes. She famously kept his calcified heart, and she preserved that for the rest of her life. And she never remarried. She had opportunities to, but she never did. And she spent a lot of her. The rest of her life kind of protecting his legacy and curating and editing his. His works. But he did leave her nearly penniless, with only one surviving child, a guy called Percy Florence Shelley. She was a bit of an outcast when she returned to England in 1823 because of her unorthodox marriage, because of her infamous parents, all of this. And Percy's father, a baronet, refused to meet Mary personally and would only provide her with very small allowance hinged on the fact that she wouldn't write anything at all controversial or immodest. So she lived very, very carefully. She wrote very carefully so as not to outrage him. And a lot of this was in part to protect her son's inheritance, which, again, I think is admirable. Finally, when her son, Percy Florence Shelley inherited Percy Shelley's Baronetcy in 1844, or Percy Shelley's Father's Baronetcy in 1844, her financial woes were slightly eased, but she suffered from illness and depression all of her life, and then she died in 1851 at the age of 50, probably, people now think from a brain tumor. So, pretty tragic end to her life.
- [72:23]
A
Yeah.
- [72:24]
B
Sad story, but she did write for the rest of her life independently, but
- [72:27]
A
Never anything to match this extraordinary work that she produced. You know, I mean, as we've said, just an extraordinary thing for a teenage girl basically to have written under the weird pressure of these extremely well known writers sort of looking at her expectantly and saying, well, come on, where's your ghost story? And then she comes out with this extraordinary. All right, so how did she do? I mean, this is their. I mean, who cares what Byron and she. Shelley thought? What everyone wants to know is what Tabby and I think.
- [72:51]
B
Yeah.
- [72:52]
A
So Tabby, we always mark these things out of appropriate in it with an appropriate index. You have chosen to mark this out of. So it's murderous reanimated corpses out of 10. How many murderous reanimated corpses out of 10 do you give Mary Shelley's masterwork?
- [73:07]
B
I'm so chuffed with that scale that I've chosen anyway. I am gonna give it shockingly a seven. Because. Because the harsh. I know it is a bit harsh. Yeah. But the. I'm kind of. I'm suffused with remorse like Victor Frankenstein and his creature. But the relentless self flagellation of just all of the characters from Victor to the creature to Victor's family, it got a little bit exhausting after a while. I know that was very of its time, but nevertheless I did find it a bit exhausting. The endless chasing theme, I found a little bit boring. The fact that none of the characters are massively fleshed out. They're kind of more ideals of people. They're all representations of different philosophical stances. But having said that, the fact that she makes you able to hate and sympathise with both Victor and his creature throughout the novel is an extraordinary achievement. And I love the nature passages. And just this, the sheer, like this idea, it's just mind blowing. Sometimes I would catch myself when I was reading it and just be staggered by the fact that she came up with this. Never mind being a woman at 18 years old, just the fact of it.
- [74:12]
A
But still only seven out of ten.
- [74:13]
B
Yeah. All right. Don't hammer at home.
- [74:15]
A
So I'm actually going to give it 8 out of 10.
- [74:17]
B
Oh, bully for you.
- [74:19]
A
So. So I'll tell you what. I think some people reading this for the first time may find bits of it do drag a bit. I think the stuff with the cottages is. Feels very 18th century.
- [74:30]
B
I like that bit.
- [74:31]
A
Perhaps a little bit too slow and. And pensive to use your word. I. I find the chases and the murders. Yeah, they are a little bit repetitive. I think some of the prose is a little bit. I'm not a massive fan of that overwrought sort of capital R romantic style.
- [74:47]
B
I think it was slightly more sort of bare than some of the books of that time.
- [74:53]
A
Yeah, I think, I mean, I guess by the standards of books of the late 18th century.
- [74:56]
B
Yeah, it's less anguished.
- [74:58]
A
Yes, maybe. So I'm marking it mainly actually on the idea. They found that the central idea, which I think is so foundational. I like all the stuff about Paradise Lost and Prometheus and I think there's no question Frankenstein is one of the core books of the Western canon. I think so much of our popular culture will be unthinkable without it. So although I think it is surprisingly unscary and unhorrifying as a book, I do think everybody should read it.
- [75:21]
B
Very good. And with that, we put the corpse to bed.
- [75:25]
A
We do put the corpse to bed. What corpses are we disinterring in the weeks to come? Tabby, what's next week's corpse?
- [75:31]
B
Next week we will be doing the Northern Lights. So the Golden Compass in the US by Philip Pullman, then Normal People by Sally Rooney, and then east of Eden by John Steinbeck, with lots more exciting corpsy treats to follow after that.
- [75:44]
A
That is exciting. So on that bombshell, thank you everybody for listening. We'll see you next week. And thank you, Tabby. Bye bye.
- [75:51]
B
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