Frankenstein

In April 1815 Tambora erupted in the Dutch East Indies, throwing enough ash into the atmosphere to cool the whole northern hemisphere. 1816 became the year without a summer: crops failed across Europe and North America, bread prices doubled, and it rained for weeks on end. Mary Godwin was eighteen, on the shore of Lake Geneva with Percy Shelley and Byron, and the weather kept the party indoors. Byron proposed they each write a ghost story.

What she wrote came out of the other obsession of those years. Galvani had made dead frogs’ legs kick with electricity in the 1780s; his nephew Aldini took the demonstration further, and in London in 1803 applied a battery to the corpse of a hanged murderer in front of an audience, making the jaw work and one eye open. Anatomy schools were buying bodies faster than the law could supply them, and the trade in stolen corpses was a public scandal.

So the novel’s question was not idle when it was asked. Electricity had just been shown to move dead flesh, the dead were being dug up for money, and a cold sunless year had made the future look uncertain. The book was published in 1818, anonymously, when its author was twenty.