The purpose of this research is to examine Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus with reference to those aspects of the work that appear to inherently derive from the English culture and literary tradition. The plan of the research will be to position Frankenstein in the context of literary history, and then to discuss ways in which the prevailing philosophical literary climate of the period in which the novel was written demonstrates a particularly English interpretation of the cultural universe.
The popular idea of how Frankenstein came to be written derives from Shelley herself, who explains in an introduction to the novel that she, her husband Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron set themselves the literary task of creating ghost stories during a short vacation at a European villa. According to Shelley, the story she conceived was predicated of the notion popular as the 18th became the 19th century that electricity could be a catalyst if not an agent of the life: "In her introduction she recalls the talk about Erasmus Darwin, who had 'preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion'" (Joseph vii). The extraordinary means form the basis for Frankenstein.
At the time the novel was written, England was on the brink of leading the Industrial Revolution in Europe. The experiments of Huntsman (crucible steel manufacture), Newcomen (steam-powered pumps), and Cochrane (coal tar production) throughout the 18th century in England were decisive in the initial transformation of England into an industrialized country (Burke 137, 173, 195, et passim). The emerging age of technology appears to have found adherents throughout the culture and to have become firmly entrenched by the time Frankenstein was written. Indeed, Rabkin says that in England early in the 18th century, "there existed a populous discourse community that accepted the rhetoric of scienc...