Erasmus Darwin

• Erasmus Darwin was the grandfather of Charles Darwin.
• Erasmus Darwin was born in Nottinghamshire and attended Cambridge University.
• Erasmus Darwin established the Lunar Society, a group of inventors, scientists and manufacturers, which played a central role in developing the Industrial Revolution in the West Midlands.
• Erasmus Darwin was a poet as well as a physician, publishing The Loves of the Plant in 1789 and The Economy of Vegetation in 1791.
• In his poems and prose work Zoonomia 1794-6, Erasmus Darwin wrote about the nature of organic life and set out the theory of development that anticipates his Grandson's later evolutionary ideas in 1859.
• Percy Shelley places Erasmus Darwin as an authority figure who thinks that the events of the story are ‘not an impossible occurrence’ in the preface of Frankenstein.
• Erasmus Darwin died in 1802, and thus could not have read Frankenstein and given his opinion on its probability.
• Percy Shelley is referring to the idea of live matter occurring from dead matter, alike Darwin’s report of how the mixture of flour and water appeared to come to life by spontaneous generation, which Mary refers to in the introduction of the 1831 version of the novel.
• For Erasmus Darwin, spontaneous generation was one means that life could emerge.
• Erasmus Darwin believed that the process of sexual reproduction developed slowly and gradually, a view shared by his grandson Charles Darwin.
• Victor Frankenstein is shown to believe the opposite, he is too impatient, ambitious and self-centered to accept this slow pace.
• Victor Frankenstein's intervention in natural processes, which from a Christian view usurps the power of creation reserved for god, also in Darwin’s terms interrupts these processes.
• Victor Frankenstein's use of chemicals to put together the creature ignores the natural cycle for the creation of new life, and so his creature an evolutionary step backwards.
• 1731 - 1802
• He sets out a theory of its development that anticipates the evolutionary ideas that his grandson Charles sets out in On the Origin of Species (1859)
• Darwin believed that life might emerge through:

  Spontaneous generation

  Species reproducing by a solitary paternal process

  Reproduction by hermaphroditic creatures
• However, he believed that in evolutionary terms these were not ideal, and that sexual reproduction, requiring the combination of both a male and female parent, was the most advanced evolutionary level of reproduction.