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Reading Frankenstein through public domain archives, wiki sources & web folklore.

1.It was written for a contest in a year without summer.
http://publicdomainreview.org/2014/10/16/the-poet-the-physician-and-the-birth-of-the-modern-vampire/
http://history.info/society/culture/1767-french-scholar-who-collected-german-ghost-stories/20631/

2.The figure of the modern vampire story came from that contest.
http://www.public.asu.edu/~cajsa/thevampyre1816/complete_text_vampyre.pdf

3.Another figure : Frankenstein, "the rampant Creature as a possible incarnation of the loathed and de-humanized climatic refugee of 1816".
http://publicdomainreview.org/2016/06/15/frankenstein-the-baroness-and-the-climate-refugees-of-1816/

3.Early SF literary work or a proto climate change novel ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gi%C3%A9tro_Glacier

5.It was first published anonymously.
http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/mary-shelley-frankenstein-and-the-villa-diodati

6.It was Inspired by Mary Shelley's personal family tragedy.
http://publicdomainreview.org/2015/11/25/the-science-of-life-and-death-in-mary-shelleys-frankenstein/#fn1

7. It was Inspired by Mary Shelley's (summer) readings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein#Shelley.27s_sources

8. The names weren't choosen at random.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/43843

9.Interpreting the myth : images stronger than the literary artwork.
http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/frankenstein-1910/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein#Films.2C_plays_and_television

10.Everyone involved In the contest died tragically
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/mar/28/byron-and-shelley-were-monsters


Conversation with Frankeinstein novel through Public Domain sources
http://publicdomainreview.org/search/Frankenstein

http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/frankenstein-1910/
#FILM
The first film adaptation of the often filmed Mary Shelley story, directed and produced by J Searle Dawley for the Edison Manufacturing Co.

http://publicdomainreview.org/2011/10/10/stories-of-a-hollow-earth/
#READINGS
Mary Shelley mentions in her diary that she read Klim as she was writing Frankenstein.

http://publicdomainreview.org/2016/06/15/frankenstein-the-baroness-and-the-climate-refugees-of-1816/
#CLIMATE CHANGE NOVEL #REFUGEES #FEAR #MONSTERS
An alternative lens  through which to read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein : humanitarian crisis triggered by the unusual weather / the monster eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in April, 1815, spun  a veil of volcanic dust around the Earth, blocking the sun.
Summer 1816 : the sun never shone, frosts cruelled crops  in the fields, and our ancestors, from Europe to North America to Asia,  went without bread, rice, or whatever staple food they depended upon  for survival. Perhaps they died of famine or fever, or became refugees.  (...) 1816 has, for  generations, been known as “The Year Without a Summer”: the coldest,  wettest, weirdest summer of the last millennium. 
Literary mythology behind that year, behind the book : "Mary Godwin (later Mary Shelley), having eloped with her poet-lover  Percy Shelley, joins Lord Byron on the shores of Lake Geneva for a  summer of love, boating, and Alpine picnics. But the terrible weather  forces them inside. They take drugs and fornicate. They grow bored, then  kinkily inventive. A ghost story competition is suggested. And boom!  Mary Shelley writes Frankenstein."
But Shelley’s novel avoids the subject of 1816’s extreme weather. Call it English Department climate denial.
Shelley’s miserable Creature, in the context of the 1816 worldwide climate shock, appears less like a symbol of technological overreach  than a figure for the despised and desperate refugees crowding  Switzerland’s market towns that year. Eyewitness accounts frequently  refer to how hunger and persecution “turned men into beasts”, how fear of famine and disease-carrying refugees drove middle-class citizens to demonize these suffering masses as sub-human parasites, and turn them  away in horror and disgust. Two hundred years on, in a summer of more  record temperatures, and worldwide droughts, when refugees once again  stream across the borders of German-speaking Europe, can we really  afford to ignore this reading of Frankenstein as a climate change novel? 
Like the hordes of refugees following the Baroness de Krüdener in  1816-17, Shelley’s Creature, when he ventures into the towns, is met  with fear and hostility, while the privileged families of the novel, the  De Lacys and the Frankensteins —  look upon him with horror and abomination. The experience of Mary  Shelley’s Creature embodies the degradation and suffering of the homeless European poor in the Tambora period, while the violent disgust  of Frankenstein and everyone else toward him mirrors the utter want of  sympathy shown by bourgeois Europeans toward Tambora’s peasant army of  climate victims suffering hunger, disease, and the loss of their homes  and livelihoods. As the Creature himself puts it, he suffered first  “from the inclemency of the season”, but “still more from the barbarity  of man”.
This summer marks the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s first sitting  down to write Frankenstein, one of the great cultural artefacts of  modernity. It’s the bicentenary, too, of the so-called “Year Without a  Summer”, which impacted her writing of the novel more than we ever  guessed. Shelley connected herself, psychologically, to the experience of the  starving and diseased thousands in the neighbouring countryside, climate  victims who never enjoyed proper representation in the press and  parliaments of Europe but mostly sank into oblivion, unmourned. In  Frankenstein’s Creature, Mary Shelley offers us the most powerful possible incarnation of the loathed and de-humanized refugee. 

http://publicdomainreview.org/2013/04/04/joseph-banks-portraits-of-a-placid-elephant/
#BOTANICAL SCIENCE #IMPERIALISM #ROMANTIC HEROIC EXPLORER #CHILDHOOD LIBRARY
The masculine hero risking his life for the sake of England and of science -> imperialism in the name of science (promote botanical exploration alongside the  exploitation of territories, peoples, and natural resources).
Joseph Banks (1743-1820) English botanist who travelled on Captain Cook’s first great voyage and went on to become President of the Royal Society and  important patron for a whole host of significant developments in the  natural sciences) :  Banks helped transformed the stereotype of the English male traveller  from the foppish aristocrat degenerating on his Grand Tour to the masculine hero risking his life for the sake of England and of science. (...) By persuading the government to fund international voyages, he ensured  the perpetuation of this new male heroic role of scientific explorer,  one articulated two years before his death by Mary Shelley. At the  beginning of Frankenstein, Captain Walton reminds his sister of  their childhood library, packed with exciting tales of earlier voyages,  almost certainly including the exploits of Cook and Banks. Walton epitomizes the romantic heroic explorer, the Banks portrayed by Reynolds who combines physical stoicism with intellectual fortitude: ‘I  voluntarily endured cold, famine, thirst, and want of sleep; I…devoted  my nights to the study of mathematics, the theory of medicine, and those  branches of physical science from which a naval adventure might derive  the greatest practical advantage’’. By representing himself first as a  scientific traveller and then as a statesman organizing scientific exploration, Banks promoted English imperial possession of the world in  the name of the new disciplinary sciences.

http://publicdomainreview.org/2014/10/16/the-poet-the-physician-and-the-birth-of-the-modern-vampire/
#MONSTER STORIES #MONK
From that famed night of ghost-stories in a Lake Geneva villa in 1816, as well as Frankenstein’s monster, there arose that other great figure of 19th-century gothic fiction – the vampire – a creation of Lord Byron’s personal physician John Polidori. 
Like Frankenstein, “The Vampyre” draws extensively on the mood at Byron’s Villa Diodati. But whereas Mary Shelley incorporated the orchestral thunderstorms that illuminated the lake and the sublime mountain scenery that served as a backdrop to Victor Frankenstein’s struggles, Polidori’s text is woven from the invisible dynamics of the Byron-Shelley circle, and especially the humiliations he suffered at Byron’s hand.
Knowing the context of Polidori’s story, it is hard not to read “The Vampyre” as an allegory of the doctor’s relationship with Byron, a text that is seamed with the mocking laughter of a man possessed of the power to debilitate through the force of personality alone.
+ BIO Polidori : One night in June, after the company had read aloud from Fantasmagoriana, a French collection of German horror tales, Byron suggested they each write a ghost story. Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote "A Fragment of a Ghost Story" and wrote down five ghost stories recounted by Matthew Gregory "Monk" Lewis, published posthumously as the Journal at Geneva (including ghost stories) and on return to England, 1816, the journal entries beginning on 18 August 1816. Mary Shelley worked on a tale that would later evolve into Frankenstein. Byron wrote (and quickly abandoned) a fragment of a story, "Fragment of a Novel", about the main character Augustus Darvell, which Polidori used later as the basis for his own tale, "The Vampyre", the first published modern vampire story in English.[3][4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_William_Polidori
+ BIO "MONK" : Matthew Gregory Lewis (9 July 1775 – 16 May 1818) was an English novelist and dramatist, often referred to as "Monk" Lewis, because of the success of his 1796 Gothic novel, The Monk.Lewis visited Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley at Geneva, Switzerland in the summer of 1816 and recounted five ghost stories which Shelley recorded in his "Journal at Geneva (including ghost stories) and on return to England, 1816", beginning with the entry for 18 August, which was published posthumously.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Lewis_%28writer%29

http://publicdomainreview.org/2015/11/25/the-science-of-life-and-death-in-mary-shelleys-frankenstein/#fn1
#READINGS #GALVANISM #VITALITY #BODY
The modern study of galvanic effects in biology is called electrophysiology, the term galvanism being used only in historical contexts. The term is also used to describe the bringing to life of organisms using electricity, as popularly associated with, but only explicitly stated in the 1831 revised edition of, Mary Shelley's work Frankenstein, and people still speak of being "galvanized into action".
Galvani's report of his investigations were mentioned specifically by Mary Shelley as part of the summer reading list leading up to an ad hoc ghost story contest on a rainy day in Switzerland — and the resultant novel Frankenstein — and its reanimated construct. However, there is no direct mention of electrical reanimation in Frankenstein.
Mary Shelley followed contemporary scientific language when she described episodes of fainting within the novel. When Victor Frankenstein creates the creature, he collapses because of a nervous illness and describes himself in this state as “lifeless”. In this instance it is Clerval who “restored’ him to “life” (ch. 5). Elizabeth faints on seeing the corpse of William: “She fainted, and was restored with extreme difficulty. When she again lived, it was only to weep and sigh” (ch. 7). The language here is of a life lost and restored; while Elizabeth is unconscious, she is described as being dead.
In her 1831 Preface to Frankenstein, Mary Shelley mentions how discussions on this idea that one could electrically stimulate a dead muscle into apparent life — known as “galvanism” — came to influence her story.
In the years leading up to Mary Shelley’s publication of Frankenstein there was a very public debate in the Royal College of Surgeons between two surgeons, John Abernethy and William Lawrence, on the nature of life itself. Both of these surgeons had links with the Shelleys: Percy had read one of Abernethy’s books and quoted it in his own work and Lawrence had been the Shelleys’ doctor.7 In this debate, questions were asked about how to define life , and how living bodies were different to dead or inorganic bodies.
> Abernethy argued that life did not depend upon the body’s structure, the way it was organised or arranged, but existed separately as a material substance, a kind of vital principle, “superadded” to the body.
> His opponent, Lawrence, thought this a ridiculous idea and instead understood life as simply the working operation of all the body’s functions, the sum of its parts. Lawrence’s ideas were seen as being too radical: they seemed to suggest that the soul, which was often seen as being akin to the vital principle, did not exist either.

Summer Readings
Far from the fantastic and improbable tale that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein now seems to us, the novel was declared by one reviewer upon publication to have “an air of reality attached to it, by being connected with the favourite projects and passions of the times”. Including :

[src : http://publicdomainreview.org/search/Frankenstein ]

The Endeavour Journal of Sir Joseph Banks, 1768-1771.  
Complete transcription of journal at Wikisource : https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Endeavour_Journal_of_Sir_Joseph_Banks

Niels Klim’s journey under the ground; being a narrative of his  wonderful descent to the subterranean lands; together with an account of  the sensible animals and trees inhabiting the planet Nazar and the  firmament (1845 edition) by Ludwig Holberg 
http://www.archive.org/stream/nielsklimsjourne27884gut/27884-8.txt

An account of the late improvements in galvanism (1803) by Giovanni Aldini.
http://ia800306.us.archive.org/26/items/accountoflateimp00aldi/accountoflateimp00aldi_djvu.txt

[src : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein#Shelley.27s_sources ]

Shelley incorporated a number of different sources into her work, one of which was the Promethean myth from Ovid. The influence of John Milton's Paradise Lost, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, are also clearly evident within the novel. Mary is likely to have acquired some ideas for Frankenstein's character from Humphry Davy's book Elements of Chemical Philosophy,  in which he had written that "science has ... bestowed upon man powers  which may be called creative; which have enabled him to change and  modify the beings around him ...". References to the French Revolution  run through the novel; a possible source may lie in François-Félix  Nogaret's Le Miroir des événemens actuels, ou la Belle au plus offrant  (1790): a political parable about scientific progress featuring an  inventor named Frankénsteïn who creates a life-sized automaton.[45]
Within the past thirty years or so, many writers and historians have  attempted to associate several then popular natural philosophers (now  called physical scientists) with Shelley's work on account of several  notable similarities. Two of the most notable natural philosophers among  Shelley's contemporaries were Giovanni Aldini, who made many public attempts at human reanimation through bio-electric Galvanism in London[46] and Johann Konrad Dippel,  who was supposed to have developed chemical means to extend the life  span of humans. While Shelley was obviously aware of both these men and  their activities, she makes no mention of or reference to them or their  experiments in any of her published or released notes.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/21765/21765-0.txt

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/20/pg20.txt

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/151/pg151.txt

https://archive.org/stream/elementschemica00davygoog/elementschemica00davygoog_djvu.txt