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The Scientist Who Animated Corpses
By Brad Steiger
FATE :: February 2007

The novel Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus (1818), with its story of the iconoclastic scientist Dr. Victor Frankenstein and the monster that he stitched together of human parts and brought to life, is one of the most famous works of fiction in the world. The eerie tale has inspired over 100 motion pictures, and the character of the lumbering monster has appeared in dozens more stage plays, television shows, and even videogames. The cinematic interpretations began with the 15-minute version filmed by Thomas Edison and J. Searle Dawley in 1910, and the most notable adaptations have been Frankenstein (1931) with Boris Karloff as the monster and Colin Clive as Dr. Frankenstein and The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) with Christopher Lee as the monster and Peter Cushing as the obsessed scientist.

Few readers of FATE will be surprised to learn that the author whose work has become one of the greatest classics of horror was a teenaged girl. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was just 16 when she met the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, a devotee of her father, the political philosopher William Godwin. Mary ran off to Europe with Shelley in 1816, and they spent the summer with Lord George Gordon Byron and his friend and personal physician Dr. John Polidori in Geneva. To pass the time during a dreary summer, Lord Byron suggested that each of them should write a ghost story. Eighteen-year-old Mary was the only one of the four who actually fulfilled the assignment, publishing her novel two years after she married Shelley in December 1816.

While the novel has been hailed as a masterpiece and a work of genius, scholars have long debated the source of Mary Shelley’s inspiration. Although eerie and haunting, the story of a scientist who overreaches the bonds of convention to fashion new life from the bodies of the dead does not truly fit the challenge of writing a ghost story. What—or who—suggested the character of Dr. Victor Frankenstein, who became the prototype of the mad or obsessed scientist, defying the limitations of his peers and the morals and values of conventional society?....

Read the rest of this article in the February 2007 issue of FATE

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