Romantics & Frankenstein Intro

Mary Wollstonecraft

Philosopher, pioneer feminist leader, and mother of Mary Shelley who wrote "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" but died of child-bed fever 10 days after Mary's birth.

William Godwin

Political philosopher, radical thinker, and father of Mary Shelley who raised her to cherish her mother's memory and ran an intellectual household.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Prominent Romantic poet and political follower of William Godwin who eloped with 16-year-old Mary Godwin in 1814 while still married.

Claire Clairmont

Mary Shelley's stepsister who traveled with Mary and Percy during their elopement and initiated the connection with Lord Byron.

Lord Byron

Famous and scandalous Romantic poet who summered at Lake Geneva in 1816 and proposed the famous ghost story writing contest.

John William Polidori

Lord Byron's personal physician who traveled with him to Geneva and participated in the 1816 ghost story contest.

Year Without a Summer (1816)

The cold, dark, and wet summer caused by a massive volcanic explosion in Indonesia, which forced the Shelley-Byron circle to spend their holiday indoors reading and writing ghost stories.

1818 Edition of Frankenstein

The original publication of the novel, finished in 1817 and published anonymously with a preface written by Percy Shelley, leading many to assume he wrote the novel.

1831 Edition of Frankenstein

The revised edition of the novel in which Mary Shelley added an extensive author's introduction explaining the "waking dream" origin of her story.

Pforzheimer Collection

The collection housed at the main branch of the New York Public Library that holds the largest repository in North America of papers related to Percy Bysshe Shelley and his circle.

Vindication of the Rights of Woman

The landmark 1792 treatise by Mary Wollstonecraft that exhorted women to obtain an education to improve and change their societal and legal situations.

Harriet Shelley

The first wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley who committed suicide, allowing Mary and Percy to officially marry in late 1816.

Percy Florence Shelley

The only surviving child of Mary and Percy Shelley, born in November 1819.

Drowning of Percy Shelley

The tragic event in 1822 when Percy Shelley drowned while boating in Italy at the age of 29, leaving Mary penniless with a young child.

Brain Tumor

The medical cause of Mary Shelley's death in 1851 at the age of 53, following several years of being an invalid.

Light vs. Darkness

A major theme in Frankenstein representing the dichotomy of knowledge and ignorance; seeking knowledge is often associated with darkness, while discoveries are associated with bright light or lightning.

The Dangerous Power of Knowledge

A core theme reflecting how Victor's and Walton's obsessive pursuits of scientific and geographical discovery lead to isolation, destruction, and ruin.

Monstrosity

The thematic question of what truly defines a monster—whether it is the creature's physical deformity or the creator's abandonment, cruel neglect, and lack of responsibility.

Byronic Hero

A literary archetype of a dark, brooding, rebellious, and highly intellectual protagonist characterized by passion and a troubled past, frequently appearing in Gothic and Romantic literature.

Gothic Novel Characteristics

A genre of literature characterized by medieval settings, supernatural occurrences, mysterious characters, an atmosphere of impending danger, and intense emotions.

Vitalism

A 19th-century scientific theory debated by Mary Shelley's contemporaries proposing that living organisms are animated by an organic, non-physical life force.

Galvanism

The scientific theory of animating or reawakening muscle tissues through the application of an electric current, which inspired Mary Shelley's concept of reanimating the dead creature.

Waking Dream

The state of conscious imagination Mary Shelley experienced in bed after listening to discussions on electricity and life, in which she envisioned a pale student kneeling beside his assembled, reanimated creation.

Philosophical Romance

The generic term Mary Shelley used to describe Frankenstein, blending the intellectual ideas of political philosophy with the emotional and imaginative elements of Gothic romance.

Robert Walton

The Arctic explorer who frames the novel through letters to his sister, seeking a northern passage and discovering the dying Victor Frankenstein on the ice.

Elizabeth Lavenza

Victor Frankenstein's adoptive cousin (or foundling in some editions) who becomes his devoted companion and is ultimately murdered by the creature on their wedding night.

William Frankenstein

Victor's young brother whose murder by the creature marks the beginning of the monster's violent campaign of revenge.

Justine Moritz

The gentle servant and nanny of the Frankenstein family who is framed by the creature for William's murder and subsequently executed.

The Female Creature

The second creation requested by the monster to ease his profound loneliness, which Victor destroys mid-assembly out of fear that a monster race might propagate.

Deism

A rational religious belief system popular in the Enlightenment and shared by William Godwin and Mary Shelley, emphasizing a creator god who does not intervene in the natural laws of the universe.

Romanticism

A major cultural, literary, and artistic movement (approx. 1780-1830) that reacted against Enlightenment rationalism by elevating emotion, nature, individual experience, and the sublime.

Enlightenment / Classicism

The intellectual movement preceding Romanticism that prioritized human reason, empirical science, order, and classical Greco-Roman literary models.

Lyrical Ballads

The foundational 1798 collaborative poetry collection by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge that officially launched the Romantic movement in English literature.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous 1798 supernatural poem about a cursed sea voyage, which heavily influenced the arctic frame and themes of Frankenstein.

Industrial Revolution

The massive mid-to-late 18th-century shift in Britain from agrarian economies to industrialized, urbanized machine systems, serving as a socio-economic backdrop to Romantic anxieties.