‘Twas a dark and stormy night, and Victor Frankenstein was on the verge of his magnum opus—and his greatest mistake. With triumph, a lumbering figure arose, a desecrated visage of a human. But excitement was replaced with horror. Quickly, Dr. Frankenstein realized he had created a monster . . . Well, more like Mary Shelley had created a monster. An incredibly iconic monster, at that, which would live on for centuries to come through reprints of her novel, movies, and other forms of media. But it begs the question: How does a nineteen-year-old come up with such a gruesome story? Moreover, why? Well turns out, the answer is a mixture of cabin fever and nineteenth century science. 

In the summer of 1816, Mary Shelley decided to go on vacation in Switzerland with her future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, their child, her stepsister Claire, Claire’s former (emphasis on former) lover Lord Byron, and his doctor John Polidori. This mis-matched cabal of characters were only driven further to the brink due to the terrible weather in Geneva. Constant storming forced them all to stay cooped up in their rented mansion, exacerbating already high tensions. Why? Well, Claire was obsessed with earning the favor of Lord Byron, who meanwhile struck up a lifelong intimate friendship with Mary’s husband Percy. Polidori grew obsessed with Mary Shelley and tried to steal her away from Percy. All the while, Shelley's son still had to be taken care of. These endless days of tribulations were much of the inspiration for Frankenstein’s characters, particularly their endless obsessions.

So, how does this spark inspiration for a mad scientist and his abhorrent creation? Well, one way Shelley and Company kept the peace was by discussing the latest rage in science: Galvanism. Galvanism was the idea that through the use of electrical currents, corpses could be jump-started back to life. By running electricity through a cadaver, it was thought that the pulses can make the body move or even come to life. It was named after famous scientist Luigi Galvani who pioneered this discovery by making frog legs twitch with the touch of electricity. He theorized that all living beings had “electric fluid” produced by the brain, which is what made bodies move. Should that electric fluid be invoked post mortem, a human could hypothetically come back alive with enough electricity. This rather morbid practice was fascinating for Shelley and Company, especially her husband. Galvanism became the inspiration behind the iconic image of Frankenstein’s Monster awakening, surrounded by flying sparks.

Another way the house was kept together through this tumultuous summer was horror stories. During dark, stormy nights, Shelley and Company exchanged dark poems and ghost stories to entertain themselves with. The entire group—sans Claire—became smitten with the genre. Naturally, without anything better to do, they ran out of stories quite quickly. Lord Byron proposed a competition to remedy their boredom: Who could write the best horror story? Polidori immediately wrote The Vampyre, which became the first vampire story put to pen. Percy and Lord Byron got to work writing, but Shelley was stumped. It was only when she experienced a hideous nightmare of a ghostly man that she figured out the story that would eventually become Frankenstein. Without their macabre taste in literature sparking such a petty contest, her most renowned novel would not have ever been put to paper to begin with. 

Frankenstein is an un-ending classic, not likely to ever die. In fact, Netflix is planning on adapting the novel for their platform. But, perhaps the chaotic conditions that it was written in contributed to the eternal fate of Mary Shelley’s magnum opus.  

Information retrieved from History.com, Britannica Encyclopedia, and Smithsonian Magazine.