Context: Romanticism, Science & the Gothic
The Summer That Created a Monster
Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein in the summer of 1816, when she was just eighteen years old. She was staying at the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva with her future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, the poet Lord Byron, and Byron’s physician John Polidori. Volcanic ash from the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 had darkened the skies across Europe, creating what became known as the “Year Without a Summer.” Trapped indoors by relentless rain, Byron challenged the group to each write a ghost story. From that challenge, Shelley produced what many consider the first science fiction novel.
Shelley later described a waking nightmare that inspired the novel: she imagined “the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.” This image — a creator horrified by his own creation — became the emotional core of Frankenstein. The novel was published anonymously in 1818, and many readers assumed it had been written by a man. Her name first appeared on the title page of the second edition in 1823.
Mary Shelley was only eighteen when she began Frankenstein during the summer of 1816. The “Year Without a Summer” created an atmosphere of darkness and unease that directly influenced the novel’s Gothic tone. The story was born from a ghost story competition at the Villa Diodati.
Galvanism and the Science of Life
In the early nineteenth century, scientists were experimenting with electricity and its effects on the human body. Galvanism — named after the Italian scientist Luigi Galvani — involved applying electrical currents to dead animals and even human corpses to make their muscles twitch. In 1803, Giovanni Aldini publicly applied electrical currents to the body of an executed criminal, causing the corpse’s jaw to clench and its eye to open. Audiences were both horrified and fascinated.
These experiments raised a terrifying question: could science actually reanimate the dead? Shelley was aware of these developments through Percy Shelley, who was deeply interested in science and had conducted his own electrical experiments at Oxford. Victor Frankenstein’s ambition to “bestow animation upon lifeless matter” is rooted in real scientific debates of the period. The novel asks whether such ambition is heroic or catastrophically irresponsible.
Frankenstein was written during the Romantic period. Romantic writers like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Percy Shelley championed the power of nature, emotion, and imagination over cold rationalism. They believed that the natural world had a restorative, almost spiritual force, and that humanity’s attempts to dominate nature through science and industry were dangerous.
Shelley uses this Romantic framework throughout the novel. The Swiss Alps, the Rhine Valley, and the Arctic wilderness are presented as awe-inspiring and sublime. Victor finds temporary peace in nature after his worst moments of guilt. But crucially, his scientific ambition represents the opposite of Romantic values — he tries to conquer nature rather than respect it, and the consequences are devastating. The Creature, denied access to human society, finds his only comfort in the natural world, making him in some ways more “Romantic” than his creator.
The Gothic Tradition
Frankenstein belongs to the Gothic literary tradition. Gothic novels typically feature dark and isolated settings, transgressive acts that violate natural or moral boundaries, supernatural or monstrous elements, and intense psychological states. Earlier Gothic works like Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) established many of these conventions.
Shelley draws on Gothic conventions but also transforms them. The “monster” of her novel is not a supernatural demon but a scientifically created being. The horror comes not from the Creature itself but from Victor’s act of creation and subsequent abandonment. The settings — laboratories, charnel houses, Arctic wastelands, and remote mountain peaks — reflect the characters’ psychological states. The novel is Gothic because it explores transgression, isolation, and the consequences of overreaching human ambition.
Frankenstein blends Gothic horror, Romantic values, and early science fiction. Shelley uses Gothic conventions — isolation, transgression, monstrous creation — but grounds them in real scientific debates about Galvanism. The novel warns that science without moral responsibility leads to destruction.
The Industrial Revolution
Shelley wrote during the early Industrial Revolution, when Britain was being transformed by new technologies, factories, and scientific discoveries. While many celebrated this progress, others feared its consequences: the dehumanisation of workers, the destruction of the natural landscape, and the arrogance of believing that technology could solve every problem.
Victor Frankenstein embodies this anxiety. He is brilliant and ambitious, but he never stops to consider whether he should create life — only whether he can. His famous warning, “Learn from me … how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge,” speaks directly to Shelley’s concern that unchecked scientific progress, without ethical reflection, leads to catastrophe. This theme remains strikingly relevant today.
Mary Shelley’s life was marked by loss. Her mother, the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, died just eleven days after giving birth to her. Shelley grew up without a mother — a theme of absent and failed parenting that runs through Frankenstein. Before she began writing the novel, she had already lost her first child, a premature baby girl who died at just two weeks old. She wrote in her journal: “Dream that my little baby came to life again.” The novel’s central image — a creator who brings something to life and then recoils in horror — resonates powerfully with Shelley’s own experiences of creation, loss, and the desperate wish to reverse death.
The Closed Book Exam
In the 19th-century novel question, you will answer a two-part question on Frankenstein. Part (a) asks you to analyse an extract of around 400 words, focusing on how Shelley uses language and structure to create meaning. It is worth 20 marks and rewards AO2, the writer’s methods. Part (b) asks you to explore a theme, character, or idea across the whole novel. It is worth 20 marks and rewards AO1, a critical response backed by quotations. This is a closed book exam, so you must memorise key quotations. Context is not separately assessed, but weaving contextual understanding into your analysis strengthens your response and lifts your AO1 marks for a personal, informed interpretation.