Frankenstein and Romantic Science

Frankenstein Lecture by Ildiko Csengei, 22 May 2021

Blog by Lisa Hutchins

Modern readers of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) may recognise the problem of scientists carrying out alarming, uncontrolled experiments that seem to fly in the face of nature without due regard for the consequences. Today we face the burgeoning of artificial intelligence, the manipulation of huge collections of personal data and the normalised surveillance of almost everything we do. Is this perhaps how animating a lifeless body with electricity would have appeared to Shelley's contemporaries?

In her lecture for Literature Cambridge, Dr Ildiko Csengei set out to explain how a growing understanding of the properties of electricity towards the end of the eighteenth century led to theories that it was the 'vital spark' that animated living beings. She first discussed the relationship between culture and science, and addressed the perception that leading Romantic poets and artists including Keats, Blake and Wordsworth offer their readers a critique of reason. However, she argued, on closer examination they offer an acknowledgement of the centrality of reason to human experience and at the root of artistic appreciation. She explained how the 'celebrity scientist' who claimed genius for himself was at least as powerful a cultural figure at this time as the poet or artist, and she told us about the work of Humphrey Davy, Joseph Banks and Joseph Priestley in this context.

But there was another aspect to the scientist of this era. As well as a romantic figure, he was often viewed as a revolutionary. For example, Davy, who moved in a circle of poets and intellectuals centred on Bristol in the 1790s, had radical beginnings with experiments into nitrous oxide that tested the limits of human consciousness. Indeed, Ildiko told us, the very concept of electricity and the vital principle was linked symbolically to revolution. Leading electrical scientists were frequently revolutionary figures. Benjamin Franklin, a leading light in the American Revolution, flew a kite in a thunderstorm to conduct the experiment that led to the invention of the lightning rod. Joseph Priestley, who worked on phenomena related to electrical discharges, was a radical religious dissenter and separatist whose house was attacked by a mob, and his laboratory destroyed. 

Ildiko told us that, in the late eighteenth century, electricity was a still-obscure new discovery to which all kinds of natural phenomena were wrongly attributed. It found its way into a disagreement between two schools of scientific thought about the fundamental principles of life. Vitalists, characterised by the Leiden school of physiology, believed that the soul, or essence of life, was somehow separate from the body, a dualist perspective. Mechanists saw the body as a machine with all necessary working parts contained within it, a materialist perspective that positioned the vital force as an intrinsic part of the body. But what was that vital force? Was it electricity? Speculation about the nature of electricity also found its way into political thought, with the radical thinker and journalist John Thelwall in his 1793 work An Essay Towards a Definition of Animal Vitality describing it as the secret source of all life, the cause of violence, and able to fly from breast to breast in the service of fomenting revolution. Edmund Burke, a leading Conservative thinker of the time, was predictably hostile to it.

Ildiko said that many attempts are made to read Frankenstein biographically, but what if it is read instead with reference to science and the contemporary debates it provoked? Then it becomes an examination of the vital principle and the nature of life, and it discusses the political and moral implications of those debates:  

These philosophers … have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and see how she works in her hiding places. They ascend into the heavens; they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers, they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.

(Frankenstein, ch.3)

In attempting to infuse the vital spark into his creation, Victor Frankenstein transgresses the boundaries of God with his act of creation. Ildiko referenced the story as a daydream about an unfulfilled wish of humankind – or rather mankind – to create a pure scientific creation without reference to either women or God. She characterised Victor as a scientific genius, an all-powerful conqueror who was penetrating the mysteries of the universe, dominating and controlling nature with ultimately disastrous effects. She cited Marilyn Butler who, in her introduction to the Oxford World Classics edition of the novel, discusses how Victor acts out contemporary debates about the vital principle and the nature of life, and also discusses the political nature of these debates.

Ildiko told us how the novel is full of the imagery of light, a metaphor that was often used about the French Revolution. She discussed the novel's subtitle of 'The Modern Prometheus', reminding us how Prometheus provoked conflict between humankind and the Gods by capturing fire, and being severely punished for it. The bringer of light is easily seen as a symbol of the Enlightenment and Ildiko characterised the novel as a product of both Enlightenment Science and the long eighteenth century, and of Romantic poetry. This is demonstrated in the creature's choice of reading matter. He masters literacy very quickly and describes his extreme delight in reading works by Goethe, Milton and Plutarch. We heard how the ideas behind the French revolution were the same as those behind the creature's development, and it – like the creature – also turned into a monster.

Romantic-era science provided the foundations for many aspects of our modern understanding, and the question of the nature of life remains one of the most important debates of both Shelley’s time and of our own. We would do well to heed her warning about the responsibilities that science brings, and the consequences it can wreak upon humanity.

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Dr Ildiko Csengei has taught at the Universities of Cambridge, Southampton and Huddersfield. She is currently a freelance lecturer and English teacher, and the owner of the tutoring company English Tuition Cambridge. Her research focuses on eighteenth-century and Romantic literature and her publications include the book Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Palgrave, 2012). Her most recent research explores how the emotional impact of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars is manifest in Romantic period writing.

Ildiko will repeat this lecture in September 2022. Bookings.

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On Sunday 12 June Peter Jones will lecture on E. M. Forster's A Passage to India.

Additionally, there are three sessions remaining in the first Virginia Woolf season:

• Saturday 29 May 2021, 6 pm Between the Acts (1941): Costume, with Claire Nicholson

• Sunday 30 May 2021, 6 pm Music in The Waves (1931), repeat session with Emma Sutton and Jeremy Thurlow

• Saturday 5 June 2021, 10 am Between the Acts (1941): Dispersed are We, with Karina Jakubowicz