In 1816, following the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia a year earlier, lingering volcanic ash darkened the skies, hiding the sun for a ‘Year Without a Summer’. As temperatures cooled, Mary Shelley and her husband, Percy, travelled to Lake Geneva, Switzerland, for a holiday with friends. Growing listless, they decided to see who could come up with the best ghost story. After days without an idea, Mary would write the beginnings of Frankenstein (1817), inspired by ‘grim terrors’1 in a waking dream, and the calamitous world around her, as storms ‘grander and more terrific than [she] had ever seen’2 raged outside. These two inspirations — terror and the power of nature — settled the question of genre: it would be a gothic novel. Half a century earlier, Horace Walpole had established the genre with The Castle of Otranto (1764), which tells the story of a family haunted by the prophecy that their hereditary status will be lost. In Otranto, Walpole uses supernatural incidents — ghosts, visions, and prophecies — to highlight the problems he saw in society, using the Manfred family as an example of the entitlement of the aristocracy. In the decades that followed Otranto, there was much philosophical debate across Europe on the inherited power of the aristocracy and monarchies — ideas which eventually erupted into the French Revolution (1789–99). William Godwin, Shelley’s father, contributed to the argument that unchecked power stunted human progress, publishing his philosophical Enquiry Concerning Political Justice in 1793. During this tumultuous period, the gothic novel became the perfect medium to express socio-political views. Authors created nightmarish scenarios as warnings against abuses of power in the real world (including Godwin, who published his own Caleb Williams in 1794).In the first few chapters of Shelley’s Frankenstein, we discover that protagonist Victor Frankenstein, an Italian-Swiss scientist, has a ‘fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature’3, and one stormy evening he succeeds. Rather than celebrating his creation of life, Victor is immediately disgusted and runs away, abandoning his newborn child. When his Creature (‘Frankenstein’ in the public imagination) finally catches up, he fills in the years that have passed. Watching a young French family from the woods, and borrowing books through their open windows, he taught himself to speak and read. But the more he learnt, the more the Creature recognised and hated his solitude, ‘Who am I? What am I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?’4 he asks, lamenting that no one was there to help him. In Shelley’s physical world, the ideas of the Enlightenment which had given rise to the French Revolution had now produced a monster. This image was widely conveyed by English newspapers by the 1800s,5 as thousands were executed in France for their ‘anti-revolutionary’ sentiment or upper-class heritage. However, Shelley’s upbringing in a household of Enlightenment thinkers would influence her. As the reader hears from the Creature, they learn to sympathise with him. Shelley creates a monster yet seeks to humanise it. Through Victor, we see how good intentions to improve humankind descended into violence and destruction, and in the Creature, the spirit of revolution is no longer just another nameless face. Instead, it is a man-made monster, abandoned when it most needed help.By the time that Shelley was writing in 1816, she had just given birth to her second child, having lost her first-born the year before. Reflecting on Frankenstein in 1831, Shelley writes ‘How I, then a young girl, came to think of [...] so very hideous an idea’6. When we consider her personal and wider environment, it is not surprising at all.