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Understanding the context of Frankenstein is essential for achieving top marks at GCSE. The examiner wants to see that you can connect Shelley's choices to the world she was writing in. This lesson covers Mary Shelley's life, the Romantic and Gothic literary movements, and the scientific and philosophical influences that shaped the novel.
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Born | 1797, London |
| Died | 1851 |
| Parents | William Godwin (philosopher) & Mary Wollstonecraft (feminist) |
| Partner | Percy Bysshe Shelley (Romantic poet) |
| Frankenstein written | 1816–1817 |
| Frankenstein published | 1818 (anonymously); revised edition 1831 |
| Full title | Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus |
| Genre | Gothic / Romantic / Science Fiction |
Mary Shelley was just eighteen when she began writing Frankenstein. She came from an extraordinary intellectual family and moved in radical circles that questioned religion, social hierarchy, and the limits of science.
In the summer of 1816, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, John Polidori, and Claire Clairmont stayed at the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva, Switzerland. Unusually cold and stormy weather (caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 — the "Year Without a Summer") kept them indoors.
Byron proposed a ghost-story competition. Mary Shelley later described how the idea came to her in a waking dream:
"I saw — with shut eyes, but acute mental vision — I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together."
This vision became the seed of Frankenstein.
Examiner's tip: The circumstances of the novel's creation are worth mentioning in essays. The stormy, claustrophobic setting at Villa Diodati mirrors the novel's Gothic atmosphere, and the company of radical intellectuals reflects the novel's engagement with dangerous ideas.
Frankenstein was written during the Romantic period (roughly 1780–1850). Romanticism was a reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment.
| Romantic value | How Frankenstein reflects it |
|---|---|
| The sublime | Alpine landscapes, the Arctic, storms and lightning |
| Nature vs science | Victor abandons nature for the laboratory — and suffers for it |
| The rebel / outcast | Both Victor and the Creature are isolated figures who defy norms |
| Emotion over reason | Victor is driven by obsessive passion, not rational thought |
| Danger of unchecked genius | Victor's brilliance leads to catastrophe |
Frankenstein is also a Gothic novel. The Gothic genre emerged in the mid-18th century and uses horror, mystery, and the supernatural to explore psychological and social anxieties.
| Convention | Example in Frankenstein |
|---|---|
| Dark, isolated settings | Arctic wastes, laboratories, remote cottages, graveyards |
| The supernatural | The creation of life from dead matter |
| Doubling / doppelganger | Victor and the Creature mirror each other |
| Transgression | Victor crosses the boundary between life and death |
| Extreme emotion | Despair, rage, obsession, terror |
| The "monstrous" | The Creature — but also Victor's ambition |
| Secrets and concealment | Victor hides his creation; the Creature hides from society |
Examiner's tip: When discussing genre, avoid simply listing features. Instead, explain why Shelley uses Gothic conventions — for example, the isolated Arctic setting reflects Victor's emotional isolation from humanity and the barrenness of a life consumed by obsession.
The late 18th and early 19th centuries saw revolutionary scientific developments that directly influenced Frankenstein:
In the 1790s, Italian scientist Luigi Galvani discovered that electrical impulses could make dead frogs' legs twitch. His nephew Giovanni Aldini conducted public experiments applying electricity to human corpses, making them appear to move.
Mary Shelley was aware of these experiments. They raised a terrifying question: could electricity bring the dead back to life?
Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin's grandfather) speculated about generating life from non-living matter. Shelley mentions him in her 1831 preface.
The Enlightenment (17th–18th centuries) championed reason, science, and progress. Thinkers like Newton, Locke, and Voltaire believed human knowledge was unlimited. Frankenstein asks: what happens when that belief goes too far?
graph LR
subgraph P["The Enlightenment Promise"]
P1["Science"] --> P2["Knowledge"] --> P3["Progress"] --> P4["Human Happiness"]
end
subgraph W["Frankenstein's Warning"]
W1["Science"] --> W2["Hubris"] --> W3["Creation"] --> W4["Catastrophe"] --> W5["Destruction"]
end
The novel's subtitle — The Modern Prometheus — is crucial:
In Greek mythology, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity. As punishment, Zeus chained him to a rock where an eagle ate his liver every day, only for it to regrow overnight — eternal torment for eternal transgression.
| Prometheus | Victor Frankenstein |
|---|---|
| Steals fire (knowledge) from the gods | Steals the secret of life from nature / God |
| Gives a gift to humanity | Creates a new being |
| Punished eternally | Suffers loss, guilt, and death |
| Defies the natural order | "Playing God" — crossing the boundary between life and death |
Examiner's tip: The subtitle tells us how to read Victor — as a figure who transgresses divine or natural limits and is punished for it. Always refer to the "Promethean" theme when discussing Victor's ambition.
Godwin was a radical philosopher who believed that society's institutions — government, religion, marriage — were corrupt and that humans were naturally good but corrupted by unjust systems. This directly influences the Creature's story: he is born innocent but turned violent by society's cruelty.
Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), arguing that women were not naturally inferior but were made so by lack of education. She died shortly after giving birth to Mary. The novel's themes of creation, birth, and parental responsibility can be read through the lens of Shelley's motherless upbringing.
Rousseau argued that humans are born good but corrupted by civilisation ("noble savage" theory). The Creature's experience directly echoes this — he begins as an innocent being who learns language, feels compassion, and craves love, but is brutalised by society until he becomes violent.
Locke proposed that the mind begins as a tabula rasa (blank slate) and is shaped entirely by experience. The Creature's development — learning language, morality, and emotion through observation — illustrates this theory. His eventual violence is the result of experience, not nature.
The Revolution began as an idealistic attempt to overthrow tyranny but descended into the Reign of Terror — mass executions, chaos, and violence. Frankenstein echoes this pattern: Victor's noble ambition to conquer death leads to destruction. The novel warns that revolutions — whether political or scientific — can spiral out of control.
Britain was undergoing rapid industrialisation. Factories, machines, and new technologies were transforming society but also creating pollution, poverty, and dehumanisation. Frankenstein can be read as a warning about technology without ethics.
Shelley's novel explores what happens when a being is denied a place in the social order. The Creature is intelligent, articulate, and emotionally sensitive, but is rejected purely on the basis of his appearance — a powerful commentary on prejudice and social exclusion.
Frankenstein was written at a time of extraordinary scientific ambition, political upheaval, and philosophical debate about human nature. Mary Shelley drew on the Romantic and Gothic traditions, on galvanic experiments, on the Prometheus myth, and on her own extraordinary family background to create a novel that asks timeless questions: What are the limits of human knowledge? What responsibilities do creators have to their creations? And what happens when society rejects those who are different? Understanding this context is the foundation for everything that follows.
Shelley's paratexts — the 1818 Preface (drafted by Percy Shelley) and the 1831 Introduction (written by Mary Shelley herself) — are crucial pieces of contextual evidence. The 1818 Preface insists that the novel is grounded in scientific possibility: it opens by claiming that the "event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence." Shelley is therefore not writing pure fantasy; she positions the narrative on the threshold between plausible science and imaginative speculation. The 1831 Introduction, by contrast, emphasises the vision-like genesis of the novel at Villa Diodati, retrospectively framing the book as the product of an almost supernatural inspiration. Top candidates can use this distinction to argue that Shelley's later editorial voice reframes her own authorship, distancing herself from the more radical, Godwinian implications of the 1818 text.
When contextualising the creation scene, strong responses move beyond the general label "Galvanism" and engage with the specific anxieties it provoked. In January 1803, Giovanni Aldini applied electricity to the corpse of the executed murderer George Forster at Newgate. Eyewitnesses reported that Forster's jaw quivered, one eye opened and his limbs twitched — so forcefully that spectators believed the body was returning to life. Shelley's generation grew up with the cultural memory of such experiments, and her refusal to give readers a detailed account of Victor's procedure is itself significant: the ellipsis around the method keeps the novel's focus on moral consequence rather than technical process. For AO3, this contextual detail can be linked precisely to AO2: Shelley's reticence is a formal choice, not a gap in knowledge.
The concept of the sublime that pervades Frankenstein draws on Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). For Burke, the sublime is produced by vastness, obscurity, power and terror; it overwhelms rational thought and induces a peculiar pleasure bound up with fear. Shelley's alpine passages — Mont Blanc, the Mer de Glace, the Arctic wastes — repeatedly stage this Burkean sublime. The Creature is literally encountered amid sublime scenery, which raises the unsettling possibility that he too belongs to the natural order that dwarfs humanity. When an examiner rewards "context integrated with analysis," this is the sort of integration they mean.
Frankenstein's epigraph is taken from Milton's Paradise Lost (Book X): "Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me man? Did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me?" This epigraph primes the reader to hear the Creature as a second Adam — and, later, as a fallen Satan — before the narrative has even begun. The novel's subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, layers a second classical intertext onto the biblical one. Strong AO3 responses note that Shelley uses intertextuality as a structural device: the Creature later reads Paradise Lost "as a true history," directly shaping how he interprets his own condition. Shelley thus dramatises reading itself as a morally consequential act.
Mary Shelley's biography saturates the novel. She lost her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, in the days following her own birth; she lost her first child in 1815; she drafted much of Frankenstein while grieving. Critics such as Ellen Moers have famously read the novel as a "birth myth" — an imaginative working-through of maternal anxiety, monstrous birth and abandonment. This is not merely biographical trivia: it illuminates why the moment of creation is presented not as triumph but as horror, and why images of birth, parenthood and abandonment structure the whole text.
Point: Shelley's contextual inheritance is not decorative; it is woven into the novel's formal choices.
Evidence: The 1818 Preface frames the narrative as scientifically plausible, while the Miltonic epigraph frames it as a second Fall.
Analysis: These paratexts operate in deliberate tension. The Preface invites a rational, almost documentary reading; the epigraph invites a theological one. Shelley holds both in play so that Victor's transgression is simultaneously a scientific overreach and a repetition of Adamic disobedience. The reader is therefore primed to see Galvanism and Genesis as overlapping registers for the same moral question: what happens when creation is undertaken without responsibility?
Link: This double framing aligns Frankenstein with the wider Romantic preoccupation with limits — the sublime as a limit of perception, Prometheus as a limit of ambition, and parenthood as a limit of self.
Exam-style question: "Starting with this extract, explore how Shelley uses ideas about science and nature in Frankenstein." (Extract: Walton's opening letter describing the Arctic.)
Grades 4–5 response:
Shelley uses the Arctic setting to show that nature is powerful. Walton says he is going to the "region of beauty and delight" but he is actually in a dangerous, icy place. This shows that people like Walton and Victor are ambitious but nature is stronger than them. The word "delight" shows he is excited about science and exploration. In the rest of the novel, Victor also tries to do something new with science when he makes the Creature, but it goes wrong. This suggests Shelley thinks science can be dangerous because nature should be respected.
Grades 6–7 response:
In the opening letter, Shelley presents Walton's ambition through the language of Romantic idealism, describing the Arctic as a "region of beauty and delight." The noun "delight" conveys Walton's naive enthusiasm for a landscape he has not yet experienced, foreshadowing how Victor will later pursue scientific "delight" at the cost of his humanity. Shelley's choice to open with Walton frames the novel's engagement with science as a broader Romantic concern: the tension between exploratory ambition and the sublime power of nature. When Victor later animates the Creature on a "dreary night of November," the earlier promise of Arctic radiance gives way to gloom, showing that scientific overreach inverts the Romantic harmony between humanity and the natural world.
Grades 8–9 response:
Shelley's epistolary frame positions Walton's letters as the outermost ring of a nested narrative, so that the Arctic "region of beauty and delight" functions simultaneously as setting, metaphor and structural signal. The abstract noun "delight" belongs to the idealising lexicon of late-Enlightenment exploration, yet is immediately complicated by the Burkean sublime — the "icy climes" and "eternal light" that threaten to consume Walton. Shelley therefore stages a collision between two contextual registers: the rational optimism of the 1818 Preface, which grounds the narrative in the "physiological writers of Germany," and the Miltonic epigraph, which frames creation as a fall. Victor's later animation of the Creature on a "dreary night of November" inverts Walton's luminous Arctic, suggesting that scientific hubris produces not enlightenment but its Gothic shadow. Read through Burke's theory of the sublime and through Shelley's own experience of maternal loss, the Arctic becomes a doppelganger of the laboratory: both are thresholds where ambition meets limit, and both punish the transgressor who mistakes knowledge for mastery. Shelley's structural decision to let Walton's voice frame Victor's is therefore itself an argument — that scientific ambition must be read in the context of its human cost.
AQA alignment: This content is aligned with AQA GCSE English Literature (8702) Paper 1 Section B: The 19th-century novel. Assessed with one compulsory essay question worth 30 marks (AO1, AO2 and AO3). Candidates analyse an extract and the novel as a whole, integrating context.