Making the Monster: The Science Behind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by Kathryn Harkup

Bloomsbury Sigma, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-1472933737

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, MP3 CD

The primary takeaway I got from Making the Monster: The Science Behind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is that Frankenstein really truly is science fiction. There are things implied in the book that science today still isn’t able to accomplish! I think in today’s world we don’t really have the ability to imagine the time that Mary Shelley was writing, when the way people saw the world was in flux, with alchemy only very reluctantly ceding its way to the barely understood beginnings of chemistry, biology, and physical science, and the materials for experimentation not easily available. The potential of science to change what makes us human, as exciting and mysterious as it was, also activated anxieties and fears that, while they have changed in specifics, still affect us today. The mystery of what science could accomplish, though, was so profound at that time that Shelley’s novel of an ambitious, obsessive scientist has so little actual science in it, and so little of the text actually devoted to creating the monster itself.

Harkup breaks her topic down by first summing up the life of Mary Shelley to the point at which she wrote Frankenstein, and then, about 80 pages in, addressing the specific aspects of science and experimentation described in the text. She does a good job of recreating the gruesome aspects of science at that time, and the enthusiasm scientists had that sent them past the point of what we would consider ethically acceptable. She covers some fascinating people and ideas, such as anatomist John Hunter (evidently the model for both Dr. Doolittle and Dr Jekyll); foundational chemist Antoine Lavoisier; serial killers William Burke and William Hare, who sold the bodies of their victims to anatomy schools; and Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta, the major players in the debate on the role of electricity in animal and human bodies, among others. Bodysnatching, graverobbing, transplants, preserving body parts in jars, the creation of batteries, chimeras, body decomposition, electroshock therapy, acromegaly, transfusions, feral men, Lamarck’s theory of genetics, all are covered in the pages as the flotsam surrounding educated (and not as educated) people at the time, often simultaneously as entertainment and education.

Making the Monster is interesting, even compelling at times, but there were some stretches that took me a long time to get through. I got impatient when Harkup moved too far into the past or too close to the current day, and much of what she said about where Shelley got her ideas was farfetched supposition. That is, not that Mary couldn’t have encountered these ideas and people, but that she might have encountered (for example) John Hunter’s ideas because of a one-time encounter between Hunter and her father. Despite it running only 274 pages, I ended up picking it up and putting it down several times.

As it’s the 200th anniversary of the novel, this is a good addition to a Frankensteinia collection, and some of the stories about the science of the times make for interesting reading if you are interested in the history of science in the 1800s. Making the Monster is a mostly enjoyable read, but outside of the specific applications of science that tie into the novel, it treads some pretty familiar ground, so it’s not an essential item for most collections.  Recommended for large public library collections and Frankenstein lovers.