Frankenstein Moon: Scientists Use Moonlight To Trace Date Mary Shelley Came Up With Monster Storyline

It wasn't a dark and stormy night when author Mary Shelley actually came up with the idea for "Frankenstein." In fact, the moon was shining through her shutters on the eve she created her monster storyline, just as she wrote, and now scientists can prove it.

Shelley's claim that her idea for Victor Frankenstein and his creation was born during a "waking dream" between the hours of 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. as moonlight peered through her window has long been disputed.

However, researchers at Texas State University pored through weather records from 1816 and say they can prove the moon would have shined into her window just before 2 a.m. on June 16, according to a press release from Science Daily.

The dispute stemmed from Shelley's written account of the timeline of events that led to the birth of Frankenstein in the preface of its 1831 edition, Reuters explains. Critics thought the account was a romanticized story to up book sales.

Shelley, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and John Polidori were staying in a villa in June 1816, when Byron challenged each person to come up with a ghost story. Shelley wrote she couldn't come up with an idea until that sleepless night when she was inspired, as "moonlight struggl[ed] to get through" a window, the Sydney Morning Herald points out. She wrote:

"I saw with shut eyes, but acute mental vision ... I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life ..."

Written documents placed Byron and Polidori at the villa on June 10, Science Daily reports, "narrowing the possible dates for the evening of Byron's ghost story proposition to a June 10-16 window."

The findings will be published in the November 2011 issue of Sky and Telescope.

Comments

[Stephan Pickering]

11:16 PM on 09/29/2011

A postscript...Polidori was Byron's physician, publishing his The Vampyre in 1819. I add this realizing there are those who have commented below who move their lips when they read, and insist on using WiteOut on their computer screens. It is a sad comment on American 'education' that they are so frighteningly illiterate.
STEPHAN PICKERING / Chofetz Chayim ben-Avraham

[QueenOfViolets]

03:44 PM on 09/30/2011

And it's a frightening comment on your moral "education" that you stoop so easily to degrading and demeaning other human beings.

[Stephan Pickering]

03:52 PM on 09/30/2011

And your petulant Jew-baiting has no defensible position here. Your words, the fact you spent the time formulating them in desperation, are an unnecessary stain on silence and no-thing-ness. Or, to put it another way: the discussion of truth stops prudently with you before the parallelism becomes close enough to yield logical and probable conclusions. Try a colonic shower.
STEPHAN PICKERING / Chofetz Chayim ben-Avraham

[NancyGene Andjayme]

09:56 PM on 10/02/2011

Stephan Pickering, you have also used the WiteOut and move their lips insults at dozens of sites. There is someone here who frighteningly unoriginal, and it isn't the others who have commented on the article.

[Stephan Pickering]

11:13 PM on 09/29/2011

Shalom & Erev tov...an historical footnote: John Polidori also took up the challenge...writing one of the first pre-Bram Stoker vampyr novels...
STEPHAN PICKERING / Chofetz Chayim ben-Avraham

[darkmark]

11:21 AM on 09/29/2011

i'll take mary shelley's version. she wrote the story and she was there at the time. even if its just as she remember its or wants it remembered what's the big deal.

[ginzberg]

10:31 AM on 09/29/2011

Oh man. Folks scrolled down through 30 some stories to this one, read it, and then complained that it wasn't very important and/or shouldn't be in the Science section. As Dr. Frankenstein said to his creation, "Get a life!"

[nycagnes]

07:03 PM on 09/28/2011

Wow! What a break through, we can all rest easy now.

[TomR]

01:53 PM on 09/28/2011

Whew! I'm glad this controversy has finally been put to rest. Twas keeping me up at night. Next up: proving that not even a mouse stirred when "The Night Before Christmas" was penned. Fingernail biters of the world are sure to rejoice.

- Tom

[RoccoRyg]

01:25 PM on 09/28/2011

Wish something like that would inspire me. The ideas for my book took years to form into a cohesive story.

[GraceNotes]

10:18 AM on 09/28/2011

From the little research I have done for a library patron, the year Shelley wrote Frankenstein was called the Year Without a Summer, because of a volcano eruption earlier in the year. Crops around the world failed because of this.

[bigskyblueeyes]

10:32 AM on 09/28/2011

I am currently studying Shelley's Frankenstein for a graduate seminar, and one of the interesting things that I've learned about 1816, the Year Without Summer, was that not only were there massive crop failures that led to famine and government controlled food rationing, but the sky was always hazy from ash still circulating in the earth's atmosphere. Another interesting fact about the Year Without Summer is that 1816 was in the middle of a cold trend in the earth's climate. Not only was it cooler than it had been in the past 50 years, but ash was complicating the matter further. Shelley is one of many Romantic era writers to be influenced by this, and the most popular to modern readers.

[GraceNotes]

10:37 AM on 09/28/2011

When I discovered this, I was just fascinated by it. Fanned.

[Sunwyn Ravenwood]

04:43 AM on 09/28/2011

Some people have WAY too much time on their hands...

[YOKEL13]

02:18 AM on 09/28/2011

I'm glad that got cleared up.... now, back to bashing NeoCons!

[RagdeSitum]

12:24 AM on 09/28/2011

Hey HP, how about a science section and then not putting this story in it.

[Gebby]

11:35 PM on 09/27/2011

great story! Why is this in the green section of politics?

[Woodsie]

09:29 AM on 09/28/2011

Because HP, who know why, hasn't yet made a Science section. Or History. Guess we can't have enough pop, drivel and trivial sections.

[jimboy71]

11:30 PM on 09/27/2011

Shelley's Frankenstein is the modern parable, the eidos of all science fiction, and the zeitgeist of our times. She remains, indesputably a genius of another order. The work is the impetus for genius, from Fritz Lang's Metropolis, to Ridley Scott's Bladerunner (not to mention the work of Philip K Dick)...all of science fiction bears witness to this singular work of origin.

[hellnomo]

11:18 PM on 09/27/2011

I bet Mr. sun was up there too, but hiding.

[WoodsideCraig]

11:02 PM on 09/27/2011

I'm glad that this raging controversy has been put to bed. It was keeping me up nights.

[StevenWells]

10:56 AM on 09/28/2011

Now if you'd used that time to write a book, there might have been people reading about your sleepless nights 195 years from now.

[WoodsideCraig]

11:13 AM on 09/28/2011

Fav'd. Nice comeback.