7. Frankenstein was also inspired by personal tragedy as much as imagination and science.
Mary Shelley’s story of reanimation was also inspired by grief and loss. On February 22, 1815, Mary and Shelley’s first child was born. A premature little girl, she did not live long enough for her parents to name her. Mary recorded in her journal how on March 5, 1815, she woke during the night to feed the child- only to find her unresponsive. Initially she tried to wake her- but instead, she discovered she was dead.
Unsurprisingly, the baby’s death hit the seventeen-year-old hard. “I think of my little dead baby,” Mary wrote in her journal, “This is foolish I suppose yet when I am left alone to my own thought and do not read to divert them, they always come back to the same point- that I was a mother and am so no longer.” Both she and Shelley tried to take their minds off their loss by reading and study. However, at night there was no escape and for Mary, the death-haunted her dreams.
“Dream that my little baby came to life again—that it had only been cold & that we rubbed it by the fire & it lived” Mary again confided in her journal, “I awake & find no baby—I think about the little thing all day.”This theme of loss and the hope of the reanimation of a lost loved one would just over a year later find its way into Frankenstein.