Frankenstein

from the Introduction to the Vintage Classics Edition (2025)
by Jeanette Winterson

A new generation is reading Frankenstein in a new way.

We are who Mary Shelley imagined we would be, more than two hundred years ago, when this nineteen-year-old woman vaulted across time. She landed here, with us, the first people on the planet to create a new kind of intelligence. An artificial life-form that we hope, or fear, will be faster, stronger, smarter. Not subject to the constraints of time as we are. A different kind of being. A different way of being.

AI.

American mathematician John McCarthy named computing power “artificial intelligence” in 1955. He did so to distinguish between the human mind—what we call natural intelligence—and what he, and his colleagues in the USA and Britain, were working to develop.

The Bible tells us in the Book of Ecclesiastes that there is “nothing new under the sun.” This is no longer true. It hasn’t been true since America dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. From then on, humans have had the power to wipe out all of life on Earth.

Since then, we have expanded the range of our self-destruct options. New under the sun is man-made climate breakdown. But we can trace it back to Mary Shelley’s time, the time of the industrial revolution, which started in the north of England in the late 1700s.

My hometown of Manchester was the world’s first industrial city—exporting its name across the world. There are thirty Manchesters in the USA alone. The industrial revolution was the time when fossil fuels first came out of the ground in planet-changing quantities. Coal powered the movement from an agricultural society to an industrial society. Coal could also produce gas, and later, electricity.

Number three new under the sun is AI. At present, AI is a tool, and humans are tool-using animals. The race in Silicon Valley is to develop AI into much more. A coworker with us. A non-biological life-form.

Victor Frankenstein says, “If I could bestow animation on lifeless matter . . .”

“Smart AI” can be embodied—from a self-driving car to a robot—or nonembodied, as are most cognitive and generative systems. As smart AI develops, it is likely that it could be both—and simultaneously—because AI is not a bounded condition in the way that biological entities are. It doesn’t have to be one thing in one place at one time. Put simply, AI is not made of meat.

Victor Frankenstein must visit the charnel houses and graveyards for his collection of body parts. That’s how he gets going on his new life-form. We are learning how to do it using the zeros and ones of code. Both these new and hybrid forms of life—Victor’s monster, and maybe ours—are powered by electricity.

Mary Shelley was reflecting her own time when she has Victor going about the ghoulish business of collecting body parts. If bodies could not be found aboveground—accidents, sudden death, victims of the death penalty—then grave-robbing would supply cadavers, or bits of them, to the medical schools. Mary Shelley wrote, “The dissecting room and the charnel house furnished many of my materials and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation.”

Once Victor has sewn his hideous assemblage together, it is what it is—lying lifeless on the slab. An ugly, oversize chunk of dead meat. What’s missing?

The answer is a massive jolt of electricity.

When Mary Shelley conceived of her man-made monster and had him galvanized into life by electricity, she was foreseeing a future that was nowhere near at hand. Electricity was poorly understood and not in practical use. It is astonishing that Mary Shelley made this connection. Life in the future would depend on electricity. A new life-form could not be brought into being without it.

To understand the genius of Mary Shelley’s intuition about electricity, we have to go back to her childhood years living with her father, the political philosopher William Godwin (1756–1836).

The tall, thin, house on Skinner Street was close to Newgate Prison. From her upper window, Mary could see those convicted of murder being bundled into carts for their last journey to the gallows. Their bodies were automatically earmarked for medical dissection. It was just a fact of life.

In 1803, when Mary was six years old, a remarkable experiment took place in the prison. Giovanni Aldini, a professor of physics at the University of Bologna, was visiting London. Aldini’s uncle was Luigi Galvani, the man who had made dead frogs leap into the air by applying electrodes, connected to a rudimentary battery, to their skin. His surname gives us both the industrial process of coating metal with zinc using an electric current and the verb: to galvanize, meaning to shock into action.

Galvani’s nephew wanted to do better than frogs, so he arranged for permission to try to re-animate the freshly dead corpse of a hanged man.

Onlookers watched in horror as fingers clenched, then an eye opened. Scientists in the room asked themselves: Was the new discovery of electricity the discovery of the divine spark?

Or, as Victor Frankenstein asks himself, as he prepares to sew together his creature: “Whence . . . did the principle of life proceed?”

It is important for the modern reader to understand that in the early nineteenth century, science and philosophy were not separated in the way that they are now, any more than a rigorous approach to science was separated from a fascination with the supernatural—religious or not. Thinkers were polymaths. Men of science (and they were men) venerated the arts as God-given expressions of beauty.

To be a scientist and a painter or musician was not odd. To be a scientist and to believe in God was normal. Speculative inquiry was wide-ranging and all-encompassing. Specialism was for tradesman.

The British chemist and philosopher-poet Sir Humphry Davy was a frequent visitor to Skinner Street. Davy had learned how to use what was then called a “voltaic pile”—a basic battery—invented by yet another Italian, Alessandro Volta (yes, we call “volts” after him).

Using the stored and stable electrical currents available via a homemade battery gadget, Davy invented the new field of electrochemistry, isolating the elements potassium, calcium, sodium, and magnesium, and speculating, as he did so, on how biological life happens.

This, then, was the environment of Mary Shelley’s childhood. Cutting-edge science, philosophical inquiry, and poetry, too.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge used to wander in, drunk and disheveled, reciting his work. Little Mary hid behind the sofa, listening to his epic ballad The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high,
came floating by,
As green as emerald.

Those hypnotic frozen wastes would come back to haunt Mary Shelley, and her readers, in her novel Frankenstein, as the monster and his creator, Victor Frankenstein, chase each other toward the pitiless end point of the North Pole.

As poetry was held in such high esteem in the Godwin household, it was unsurprising that teenage Mary should fall for the willowy, intelligent Percy Bysshe Shelley. A frequent visitor to Skinner Street, Percy read his poems and Mary swooned. He was twenty-one. She was sixteen. It was love at first sight.

When Mary had finished her household duties, and her father was out or in his study, she left behind the squalor of Skinner Street, never clear of the hot stink of animals waiting to be butchered at nearby Smithfield Market, and ran to leafy St. Pancras churchyard, where her mother was buried. Percy Shelley would wait for her there.

Over the grave of Mary Wollstonecraft, the two young people discovered a shared vision. A vision of equality and democracy that had as its guiding lights the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789. Mary Wollstonecraft had been in Paris during the Revolution, in love with a dashing American called Gilbert Imlay (who turned out to be a cad) and all the while arguing by letter with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose liberty, fraternity, and equality did not extend to women. It was Mary Wollstonecraft who had written and published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792 in response to the American Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1790).

Now, young Mary, who had barely met her mother (Mary Wollstonecraft died in childbirth), believed with her lover, Percy Shelley, that they, too, could work to change society.

Both would do it by writing.

Mary eloped to Italy with Shelley, much to the rage of William Godwin, who had called marriage a monopoly in his writings but didn’t want his daughter to become a practical experiment in breaking one up. Shelley was married already.

In 1816, finally able to marry legally after the suicide of Shelley’s first wife, Mary was (partly) reconciled with her father and the couple returned to London.

Percy Shelley hated England—small-minded, mean-spirited, obsessed with money, as he saw it—but then, he never had to work for a living as his father was wealthy. Shelley didn’t have a lot of spare cash, but he had enough to plan their next trip abroad: a holiday on Lake Geneva.

His great friend, the poet Lord Byron, would come along. Byron would travel with his mistress and his medical doctor. He couldn’t manage without female attention, and he was a terrible hypochondriac. He was also England’s most famous poet. “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” as Lady Caroline Lamb memorably put it. Yet, he was a loyal friend, and he really did like Mary, and liked arguing with her about everything, especially female emancipation, which Percy Shelley supported and Byron did not.

Just before everyone set off, Mary and Percy Shelley went to hear a lecture by a Sir William Lawrence, an eminent medical man (and Shelley’s own doctor) who had come to believe that biological life was nothing more than an electrochemical bath. Life had none of what he called “superadded” value. In other words, no soul, no spirit, nothing waiting to be drawn up to the afterlife.

Man was a kind of machine. A machine made of meat, but a machine nonetheless.

This blasphemous and fascinating theory took its light from the shadow cast by the terrors of the early industrial revolution. For the first time in history, humans were inventing things that seemed to have a life of their own, and with the capacity to run forever. No sleep. No death. No dreams. Machines.

Folktales are stuffed with self-operating appliances that work by magic. Brooms that fly, buckets that fill, pots that boil, axes that chop. Now, self-operating tools had leaped out of fairy tales and onto the factory floor. These merciless machines showed no pity to humans—reduced to a “pair of hands” to “mind” the machine. Humans must keep up with the monstrous pace of these machines or be left behind.
_________

When the young people arrived on Lake Geneva, they did not realize that the earlier volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora, in Indonesia, would do more than change their holiday plans. The stage was set for one of the most famous stories ever written.

The year 1816 would become known as “the year without a summer.” Atmospheric conditions altered by fallout from the biggest eruption in history affected America and Europe. There was snow in the summer. Rain most of the time, and a crepuscular darkness.

Picture it. Damp days. Evenings of candlelight and shadows. Fires that barely kept the wetness out of the rooms. Heavy clothes that did not dry. The lake hid invisible under a cloud of heavy mist. They could not swim, sail, or ride. Indoors, they could read, write, or talk.

Byron hated to be bored. He proposed that they each write a supernatural story. What was most frightening? Something alive? Something dead but alive? It was here that his physician, Dr. John Polidori, came up with an early vampire story. Dr. Polidori was a blood doctor.

For Mary Shelley, a new question emerged. What about something that had no precedent in life? A new life-form. Part man. Part machine. And galvanized by electricity. . . .