Making the Monster: The Science Behind Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - Paperback
Kathryn Harkup
Bloomsbury Sigma, 2018 · 304 pages
$18.00
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About This Item
In the summer of 1816, an eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley sat in a villa on Lake Geneva and imagined a scientist reanimating the dead. What makes this book remarkable is that almost nothing in Frankenstein was pure fiction. Harkup traces each horror back to real experiments: Luigi Galvani making dead frogs twitch with electrical current, Giovanni Aldini jolting the corpse of an executed murderer at Newgate Prison, bodysnatchers raiding graveyards to supply anatomy theaters across Europe. The result is a vivid, chapter-by-chapter companion to the novel that reveals how much real science Shelley wove into her story, and how much of that science was already unsettling the public before she wrote a word.