Science confirms “shining moon” story behind Shelley’s Frankenstein

Source: Dateline Zero 

Mary Shelly’s account of what led to the writing of Frankenstein had long been doubted. She first shared how she came to write Frankenstein in the preface of the book’s 1831 edition.

Shelly wrote that she was staying with (future husband) Percy Shelley, at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland in June of 1816. Also present were Lord Byron and friends Claire Clairmont and John Polidori. Lord Byron challenged all of them to try their hand at writing a ghost story. “It proved a wet, ungenial summer,” she wrote, “and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house”.

Shelley saw the “bright and shining moon” through her window that night; and she wrote the story while she was in what she called “a waking dream.”

I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.

This had all been dismissed as fabrication, a ruse to sell more books. But an astronomy professor thinks that she was telling the truth and is using the sky to prove it.

Donald Olson, an astronomy professor at Texas State University in San Marcos,told Reuters on Monday that the night sky would argue that she was telling the truth. “Some scholars are very skeptical, they even call her a liar,” Olson said. “But we see no reason, either in the science or in the primary sources, to doubt Mary Shelley’s account.”

The closest account of Byron’s challenge comes from Polidori’s diary, in which he tells of the party gathering at the Villa Diodati for a philosophical discussion that ended ‘after the witching hour’ of June 16, 1816. The next day he wrote that ‘the ghost-stores are begun by all but me.’”

While that only suggests that a writing challenge had been made, itdoes back up some of Mary Shelly’s account of the evening. But what about the too-good-to-be-true scene of the moon filling the window after a dreary, rainy evening? That’s a bit far-fetched, ain’t it?

“We verified when the moon would have shone on her window, which is when she first came up with the idea for the story we know as Frankenstein,” Olson said.

The Villa Diodati still stands above Lake Geneva and the room where Shelley stayed is well known. Olson and his researchers made “extensive topographic measurements of the terrain” and investigated “weather records for June of 1816,” described by Lord Byron and Polidori as unusually wet and rainy.

On that night, however, “we determined that a bright, gibbous moon would have cleared the hillside to shine right into Shelley’s bedroom window just before 2 a.m. on June 16,” Olson said. 

He said that had there been no moonlight visible that morning, it would have indicated fabrication on her part. “This indicates her famous “waking dream” that gave birth to Frankenstein’s famous monster occurred between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. on June 16,” he said.

Full article at Dateline Zero. Picture of Mary Shelly via Wikipedia / Wikimendia Commons.