The Origin of that Famous Story

Ever heard of Erasmus Darwin? Unlikely. He was the grandfather of the famous Charles Darwin. In his time though, Erasmus was a “towering figure in his own right”, writes Carl Zimmer in Life’s Edge. He believed in a unified vision of life, but realized nobody would read a long technical book. So he came up with the idea of a new genre: scientific poetry!

“Darwin turned the finer points of botany into hugely popular verse.”

Impressive, given that he lived in the age of Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley.

 

One of his poems, The Temple of Nature, introduced his belief in the idea of evolution (“New power acquire and larger limbs assume”). Yes, he had no proof – his grandson would do that decades later. As expected, many were appalled by the idea that species changed over time, as opposed to God creating them in that state from the beginning.

 

But others were intrigued. Including writers like Percy Shelley. In 1816, Shelley and his lover, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin went on a vacation to Switzerland. Part of it was spent with Lord Byron. It was bad timing – bitterly cold and rainy. So they wrote ghost stories for each other, to kill time.

 

One night, her fiancé and Byron discussed Erasmus Darwin’s claim that life-forms arose from organic matter. If the idea was correct, they mused, did it imply that a corpse could be brought back to life? Organic matter (leads to) life (leads to) death (leads to) (still) organic matter (leads to) life (again)…

 

That night, Mary had a dream of a man kneeling beside a stitched-together corpse. He used “some powerful engine” to bring it to life. Eventually, she turned her dream into a full-blown novel titled… Frankenstein. (Yes, after marriage, she became Mary Shelly).

 

While her famous book doesn’t exactly name the vital trigger to reanimate the corpse, it could have meant electricity. By then, it was clear electricity had something to do with life – a shock could make the legs of a dead frog move. Plus, electricity itself wasn’t well understood at the time, and so it was mysterious enough for a writer of fiction to attribute powers to it...