How Frankenstein came to be written

• In the revised edition of Frankenstein in 1931, Mary Shelley describes how the novel was conceived.
• Mary Shelley, Shelley's step-sister Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron, and Dr. John Polidori travelled to Switzerland in May 1816.
• Claire and Byron were lovers in England and she wanted to resume their relationship.
• Polidori was slightly in love with Mary.
• 1816 was known as the ‘year without a summer’ as it was worst on records.
• Mary stated in the introduction that the ‘incessant rain often confined us to the house’.
• During these days the group was forced to entertain themselves.
• After reading a volume of German ghost stories Byron issued a challenge, for all of them to write a ghost story of their own.
• The men quickly had their ideas and began to write while Mary Shelley struggled for inspiration.
• One evening, Byron and Shelley discussed the ‘nature of the principle of life’ and how Dr Erasmus Darwin had experimented with giving movement to dead matter with electrical stimulation.
• Mary Shelley then states in the introduction that she dreamed of what would become chapter 5 in the complete novel.
• She dreamt of a student completing ‘the thing he had put together’ but then becoming terrified and hoping that 'left to itself’ would ‘subside into dead matter’.
• The man went to sleep but ‘is awakened to behold ‘the horrid thing that stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, looking down on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes’.
• Mary Shelley wished she could think of something as frightful for her own story, before realising that 'what terrifies me will terrify others' and began to write the tale upon this dream.
• Mary began work on Frankenstein on 16th June 1816 and continued through summer and autumn, by which time they had returned to England.
• The writing of Frankenstein was interrupted as Shelley's first wife drowned herself in early December 1816.
• Mary and Percy Shelley married the same month as Shelley's first wife's death.
• The court case over custody of Shelley's two children with his previous wife Harriet lasted nearly 2 months, and Shelley failed to obtain custody.
• Mary completed the story by 10th April 1817 and by the 13th of May had finished a fair copy to be submitted to publishers.
• The novel was published anonymously on 11 March 1817 and was dedicated to Mary's father.