Many of you may be familiar with the name “Frankenstein”, the story of the mad scientist who creates a monster by assembling different parts of dead people and how the monster creates havoc in the life of not just its creator but many other innocent people as it goes on a killing spree. The novel was published on January 1, 1818.

The author was Mary Shelley, just 19 years old at the time. But her name did not appear in the first edition. People came to know who had actually written the story only when the second edition appeared five years later, in August 1823. Stage plays and films were made on Frankenstein and people read and remember it even after 190 years of its publication!

It might interest you to know how the story came to be written. It was the summer of 1816, unusually cold and rainy. Percy Bysshe Shelley, the famous poet and Mary, soon to be his wife, went to visit Lord Byron, another famous poet and his friend Polidori at their villa by Lake Geneva in Switzerland. They had planned a lot of outdoor activities which fell through because of the weather.

So the group of friends stayed indoors, reading and discussing ghost stories. Finally they got the bright idea that each of them should write a story about the supernatural and the scariest story would be declared the winner.

That is when Mary wrote the story of Frankenstein and hers was voted the best story of all. She claimed to have got the idea from a dream about a student who was kneeling beside a creature he had put together from different parts. Mary’s was the only story which was published as a novel.

Franenstein belongs to the kind of novel known as “Gothic”. Horace Walpole’s “Otranto:A Gothic Story” published in 1764 is said to be the first Gothic novel. These were all set in Medieval times and had a lot of supernatural happenings. They were very popular during the time and surprisingly, there were many women writers of Gothic novels.

Mary Shelley also introduced something new in literature, a trend popularly refered to as “the mad scientist genre”. These stories were not just meant to be scary but also pointed out the dark side of human nature and what might happen if one let one’s creations go out of hand. They are regarded as the forerunner of modern science fiction.

Frankenstein is also regarded as an allegory, that is, a story with a deeper meaning. Mary Shelley wrote it during the early phase of the Industrial Revolution when there were dramatic advances in science and technology. She wanted to show what might happen if the scientist went too far and created something terrible just for the sake of doing something new.

And also how dangerous the consequences might be if the creation rebelled against its creator, as the monster created by Frankenstein did. The novel was also a warning that the application of science can lead to unforseen results. So the scientist has to be both careful and responsible about what he was creating.  

Frankenstein became an instant success. It became widely known when it was adapted as a stage play by Richard Brinsley Peake in 1823. The earliest film versions were silent ones and therefore not so effective. The version created by James whale in 1931 proved a great success. He followed it with sequels of his own making – Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Son of Frankenstein (1939) and Ghost of Frankenstein (1942). He also changed the original story considerably to make pure ‘horror’ films.

The message of Frankenstein is a significant one even today. Science should recognise its own limits. It should be used to promote human welfare and not create something that might prove to be dangerous or harmful to mankind.