killed her mother but she had allowed
her own baby girl to die.”
Mary became pregnant again, and in
January 1816 she gave birth to a son she
named William after her father, who
nevertheless continued to condemn
her. Shelley was still wrestling with
financial troubles, and Jane (going by
the name Claire) was pregnant with
Byron’s child. Against this backdrop,
the group traveled to Lake Geneva.A
t the time, “Byron was the only one
among us who put his thoughts on
paper,” Mary wrote of the group’s
first weeks on the lake. The poet
was working on the third canto of
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which had
made him famous when the first two
cantos were published in 1812. Still, he
had plenty of time to socialize with his
new friends. “Many and long were the
conversations between Lord Byron and
Shelley, to which I was a devout but
nearly silent listener,” Mary later wrote.
On the night of June 15, the poets’
talk turned to matters of life and death.
“Various philosophical doctrines were
discussed,” Mary later wrote, “among
others the nature of the principle of
life, and whether there was any prob-
ability of its ever being discovered and
communicated... Perhaps a corpse
would be re-animated; galvanism had
given token of such things: perhaps the
component parts of a creature might be
manufactured, brought together, and
endued with vital warmth.”
These ideas were very much in
vogue at the time. In the late 1700s, the
pseudoscience of galvanism had begun
when Luigi Galvani, an anatomist at
the University of Bologna, discovered
that he could make a dead frog’s legs
move by applying electricity. In 1803,
Galvani’s nephew, Giovanni Aldini,
took these experiments one step further
by attempting to reanimate the body
of George Forster, who had been con-
victed of murdering his wife and child.
After Forster was hanged in London’s
Newgate Prison, his body was taken to
the Royal College of Surgeons, where
Aldini shocked the corpse’s face with21REX
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UTT
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