I got a big kick out of that link because it talked about Frankenstein.
I have a personal connection with Frankenstein because one of my ancestors, Humphry Davy, 'palled' around with Mary Shelley and other creepy folks.
Frankenstein is Shelley's first novel. "It is not singular that, as the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity, I should very early in life have thought of writing," she once wrote. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died in childbirth, leaving her a legacy of feminist writings such as Vindication of the Rights of Women, which Shelley said she read again and again.
Her father, the political writer and social reformist William Godwin, saw to it that his daughter read the classics and studied French and Latin. It was in her father's London home that Mary met the writers Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles and Mary Lamb, and the politician Aaron Burr. Scientists, including the physician Erasmus Darwin, father of Charles, and chemists Humphrey Davy and William Nicholson,also frequented the Godwin home. Diary entries from the period during which she was writing Frankenstein reveal that Shelley was gathering scientific background for the novel by reading Davy's Elements of Chemical Philosophy. An influential scientist of the day, Davy worked with galvanism, the science of healing and rekindling life via electrical current.
neh.gov
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