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Mary Shelley’s manuscript pages for Frankenstein were edited by her husband, the great romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The influence of the “Romantic era“ can be seen on Frankenstein’s every page. The writers of the Romantic era were not so much interested in “romance” as in nature — and of the place of human beings in the natural order of things. Which makes Frankenstein, in its own way, the ultimate “romantic novel.”

Video Transcription:

The beauty and grandeur of nature! The rush of scientific discovery!

It all seems a little … 19th Century, doesn’t it?

You’d be right about that. That’s why understanding Frankenstein means understanding the time in which it was written.

There are two things about Frankenstein that really stick out.

First, Mary Shelley’s odes to nature. Seriously. It’s like every couple paragraphs we suddenly get another three or four or five hundred words about nature. Nature revives the characters, feeds their souls, inspires, rejuvenates, even provides a refuge.

Why? Don’t get me wrong. Nature is great and all, but Shelley’s love of nature really reflects the spirit of her time. Shelly was writing Frankenstein during the Romantic era—a period when writers were interested in emphasizing the pastoral over the urban. They wanted to reconcile man and nature.

The second thing that sticks out about Frankenstein is its scientific concerns. Victor Frankenstein’s experiments may seem pretty prehistoric to you, but they have their basis in late 18th and early 19th-Century scientific questions. In Shelley’s time, scientists and philosophers were grappling with evolution and the origin and nature of life.

In other words, Shelley may seem out of place among the authors on your shelf. But among the likes of Wordsworth and Coleridge and Blake, she fit right in.