At just 21 years of age, Mary Shelley created a character that would become an icon of both literature and cinema. Frankenstein was her entry in a competition with her husband Percy Shelley and their friends Lord Byron and John Polidori to write the best horror story. Fascinated by Luigi Galvani’s experiments with reanimation of dead frogs, Shelley gave the world a vision of a reanimated, composite human. The title character is the misguided doctor behind the experiment; Shelley gave the monster no name but in the two centuries since, the word “Frankenstein” has famously become associated on page, stage and screen with the creature jolted into life.
By the way, the competition to write the horror story had another familiar entry – The Vampyre (see tomorrow’s Word of the Day).
