Frankenstein's Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early-Nineteenth-Century London

IWAN RHYS MORUS, Frankenstein's Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early-Nineteenth-Century London. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. xiv + 324. ISBN 0-691-05952-7. $45.00, £32.50 (hardback).

doi:10.1017/S0007087405327531

The title is arresting but misleading, in that Mary Shelley's Creature makes as slight an appearance in this book as (despite James Whale and company) electricity does in Frankenstein. But Morus explains that he intends his title to be an ironic reflection on the relations between the natural philosophers and society. He is here concerned to chart the emergence of an industrialized and commodified culture in Britain, in which the science and technology of electricity played a central role. 'For most Victorians who paid attention to such matters', he writes, 'electricity had little immediate to do with fields of force or even a lumeniferous ether' (p. 261). The concern here is not with the physics of...