We are about to unfold the story of Frankenstein.
It's alive!
200 years ago,
a 19-year-old named Mary Shelley
created the character of Frankenstein,
one of the earliest and most iconic pieces of science fiction.
And she led an incredible life overshadowed by death
which is why we are here.
"It's one of the strangest tales ever told.
"It deals with the two great mysteries of creation...
"life and death."
This is the exact place Frankenstein was made.
Except not really, because he is quite made up.
What can he mean?
It is however one of the world's oldest standing operating theatres.
And as I've just discovered...
everything here can kill you.
Strychnine, it's a nerve poison
from the plant 'strychnos nux-vomica.'
Clue's in the name, don't eat it.
Oh, and belladonna!
That's St Anthony's Fire because your fingers will go black.
and it would look as though you were burning from the edges of your body,
which is really quite worrying.
Ergot is the fungus that grows on rye
and it used to send entire villages mad.
They'd grind up the grain, put it into the bread
and the whole village would trip.
Dr Kathryn Harkup is a chemist
and she literally wrote the book on Mary Shelley.
Where did it begin? Possibly when I was a research chemist.
I was using a lot of compounds that were potentially quite dangerous.
I started to become intrigued as to how such things could cause death.
And when you start to think about it, what is death?
It's something that we can never actually know about until it arrives,
and it's kind of too late.
Are you the person at dinner parties
that casually brings up death by hanging and poisons?
Absolutely.
- Is that good or bad? - It depends on your audience.
The brain of a dead man, waiting to live again
in a body I made with my own hands.
This is the extraordinary thing,
the word "scientist" wasn't even invented when Mary Shelley was alive.
In many ways,
Mary Shelley's childhood was very typical for a woman of that age.
She had very little formal education.
But people stumbled upon extraordinary discoveries,
things like electricity,
and anyone could have a go.
The origins of the actual story that she started writing,
correct me if I'm wrong, but they were all holed up in a house
and they set themselves the challenge to write a ghost story.
Absolutely. It was 1816.
It was known as "the year without summer"
or "the year of eighteen hundred and frozen to death".
- Very catchy. - Absolutely.
And it was just miserable.
They were stuck inside because it was just torrential rain,
spectacular thunderstorms,
all around the surrounding mountains
like they'd never seen before.
It was Byron, Shelley, Mary and this guy called Polidori.
Polidori was the youngest ever
graduate of Edinburgh University in Medicine.
And they're bored out of their minds because they can't go out.
So they start reading each other ghost stories
and trying to scare the lives out of each other.
And I think in a moment of... a throw-away casual remark,
Byron says "I challenge you to write a ghost story."
"We shall each write a ghost story." And that was it.
They all set about writing a ghost story to try and scare each other.
And what is extraordinary is that the two writers, Percy Shelley and Byron,
they start something but they never finish it.
However, John Polidori and Mary Shelley
create two literary genres in one night,
the vampire and Frankenstein,
the most iconic characters from horror fiction
I think, you can think of.
So vampires and Frankenstein were built on the same day.
-Yeah. - One dark and stormy night.
One dark and stormy night and a throwaway comment from Lord Byron.
My God! That's mental!
What's the purpose of the...
There's a church underneath and there's a lot of blood.
What you don't want is blood dripping on your Virgin Mary downstairs
because that could create some kind of religious crisis.
So apparently underneath all of these floorboards,
it's packed with sawdust just to soak up the blood.
Death permeated a lot of the culture then.
I'm wondering what sort of impact you think that had
on Mary Shelley's mind at the time.
I think death was much more immediate.
People knew what it looked like.
Today it's very removed. It's very sanitised for us.
We don't have public hangings, thank God.
But back then they did. You could go and watch them.
Crowds swarmed past Mary Shelley's childhood home
to the hangings that were carried out very nearby.
There's an incredible amount of brutality
that went on with executions,
but it didn't actually get everyone, didn't it?
No. The most famous case is Anne Greene,
who was found guilty of murder and so she was hanged,
as was normal punishment for murderers at the time.
However, there was a bit of a delay
before the surgeons arrived to dissect her,
by which time she'd started breathing.
And she made a complete recovery.
She'd been accused of murdering her child.
And actually her child had been born so premature
that there was no chance of it surviving.
And, pure shame, she'd hidden the body.
She was clearly distressed, as you would be.
So they told the court "She is not a murderer.
"There is no way this child could have survived.
"She deserves a second chance."
And she got her second chance.
And she made a bit of cash laying in her coffin,
and selling tickets to be seen in the coffin she would have been buried in.
But death was also something very personal in Mary Shelley's life.
She'd experienced a lot of death when this was being written.
Yes.
Before the idea of Frankenstein occurred to her,
her first pregnancy resulted in a premature birth.
The child lived for about two weeks, which is just heartbreaking.
She nursed this child. She wanted the best for it, obviously.
But sadly, one morning she woke up and she found her baby dead.
And a few nights later
she dreamed that her baby had been restored to life.
That she'd rubbed it and warmed it by the fire
and it had come back to life.
There was an awful lot of death in Mary's life
and this is why I think it has stood up for 200 years.
There are so many different ways you can read 'Frankenstein'.
I think the main theme of the story is about caring for,
and taking responsibility for your actions.
Victor Frankenstein's science is brilliant.
It is his lack of care of his creature,
he abandons his creature almost as soon as he wakes up,
and that brings about his downfall.
She was estranged from her father when she was writing 'Frankenstein'.
Maybe she was also reaching out to her father
and saying "No, seriously, you created me and you abandoned me."
She made us think about who we are as people
and how we treat our fellow creature... creatures,
not just judging them by their appearance
and if they are different to the rest of us,
it is judging a creature for their worth
and what they can potentially contribute.
That a teenage girl, that no one would expect anything of,
has a book that is still being discussed seriously and in depth
200 years later and still makes us think and question,
I think that's pretty impressive.