[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe;831240
An interesting aside about Frankenstein. In a book I'm currently reading, [URL="http://www.amazon.com/Quirkology-ebook/dp/B001QA4TD2/ref=kinw_dp_ke?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2"

Quirkology by Richard Wiseman[/URL], the author states, "The use of electricity apparently to resurrect the dead helped inspire Mary Shelly to write Frankenstein." MobileRead Members, help me out on this one: I may be wrong, but I thought the use of electricity to bring the monster to life was an invention of the film-makers who produced the 1931 movie version. If memory serves me right, Mary Shelly never mentioned by what method Frankenstein accomplished the feat in her book. Am I mistaken?

According to this ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein#Plot


During the rainy summer of 1816, the "Year Without a Summer," the world was locked in a long cold volcanic winter caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815.[3] Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, aged 18, and her lover (and later husband) Percy Bysshe Shelley, visited Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva in Switzerland. The weather was consistently too cold and dreary that summer to enjoy the outdoor holiday activities they had planned, so the group retired indoors until dawn.

Amongst other subjects, the conversation turned to galvanism and the feasibility of returning a corpse or assembled body parts to life, and to the experiments of the 18th-century natural philosopher and poet Erasmus Darwin, who was said to have animated dead matter.[4] Sitting around a log fire at Byron's villa, the company also amused themselves by reading German ghost stories, prompting Byron to suggest they each write their own supernatural tale. Shortly afterwards, in a waking dream, Mary Godwin conceived the idea for Frankenstein:

I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for SUPREMELY frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.[5]