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It happened, perhaps unfortunately for the inquirers into the knowl-edge of diseases, that other sciences had received improvement previous to their own; whence, instead of comparing the properties belonging to animated nature with each other, they, idly ingenious, busied themselves in attempting to explain the laws of life by those of mechanism and chemistry; they considered the body as an hydraulic machine, and the fluids as passing through a series of chemical changes, forgetting that animation was its essential characteristic.
-Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia'
IT IS WELL KNOWN THAT FRANKENSTEIN IS NOT THE MONSTER, BUT ITS CREator; yet the character of Victor has long been secondary to that of the creation. In fact, he has by now largely been replaced, if not in .name, then in characterization, by a man more straightforwardly sinister. The scene from James Whale's film is iconic: under a white cover, a lifeless body, then lightning is sucked in through the gothic machine and gives rise to the hulking form of Boris Karloff. Inanimate matter made to move by the power of electricity, a slave to the unscrupulous man of science.
It is less well known, or perhaps just ignored, that in Mary Shelley's novel there is no mention of electricity at the moment of creation. There are "instruments of life" and there is a "spark of being," but no lightning, no Galvanic fluid, and certainly no robotic slave. Nonetheless, scholars assert the electric animation with surprising confidence, seeing no real need to argue the case: "Frankenstein critics generally agree that the battery gives life to the monster," writes Richard C. Sha, and Paul Gilmore adds that Frankenstein is the "[most famous] use of electricity in romantic literature." Peter Vernon states flatly: "Anyone who knows Frankenstein at all will re member how important electricity is."2 The repetition and circulation of a proposition, of course, does not make it a fact.
The most thorough electric case I have seen presented is that by Anne K. Mellor, who states that "[t]o understand the full implications of Frankenstein's transgression, we must recognize that Victor Frankenstein's stolen ?spark of life' is not merely fire; it is also that recently discovered caloric fluid called electricity."3 There is no question of the quality or breadth of Mellor's historical...