Frankenstein

Frankenstein, a novel by Mary Shelley, 1818

Mary Shelley[edit | edit source]

her mother was the famed writer and women's rights thinker, '''Mary Wollenstonecraft'''
- Wollenstonecraft is considered the "first feminist"
her father, '''William Godwin''', was a famous political philosopher and novelist
- Godwin was considered a political radical for his attacks on institutions, "aristocratic privilege", and religion
  - he argued
- he was an early promoter of "utilitarianism," a philosophy that sought to create the "greatest good" or "happiness" for the "greatest number of people"
- Godwin wrote a novel that drew from John Milton's "Paradise Lost"
  - Mary Shelley also drew inspiration from ''Paradise Lost''
Shelley had an affair with the poet Percy Shelley, who was married, and married him in 1816

it was on a trip to Switzerland in 1816 w/ Shelley, the poet Lord Byron, and William Polidor that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein

"It proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house"

Benjamin Franklin's discoveries in the mid-1700s of the nature of lightning as electricity spurred research into electricity
in the late 1700s, Luigi Galvani realized that muscle tissue reacted to electricity
- his assistant accidently touched a dead frog's leg with a charged scalpel, which made its leg move
- Galvani later realized that electricity produced the same effect
- he proposed that electricity animated living things
- he called it "animal electricity"
  - became known as "Galvanism"

- - became a cultural phenomenon (meme)
  - cartoons and stories of corpses raised from the dead with electricity
- the term "Galvanism" was actually coined by Alessandro Volta, who built the first chemical electric battery
  - for Volta, "Galvanism" referred to generation of electricity via chemical reactions