FRANKENSTEIN, frank'en-siin. The famous romance of 'Frankenstein' was begun by Mrs. Shelley in the summer of 1816, while she was staying with her husband the poet, Lord Byron and another friend in Switzerland by Lake Geneva; it was completed at Marlow, in England, the next year and published in 1818. On wet evenings the little Swiss party of four used to read German ghost stories; and at the suggestion of Byron, they entered into a half serious compact that each should write one for the amusement of the company. Only Mrs. Shelley quite fulfilled the engagement. The outline of her story came to her in a dream— that is, in a horrible nightmare— one night after she had been greatly excited by a con versation between Byron her husband over the possibility of creating and endowing a being with life. This problem Frankenstein, a young student in chemistry and anatomy, succeeds in solving. But the creature whom he builds up in his laboratory and infuses with life turns out to be a huge male monster eight feet in height, with long ragged and roll ing, blood-shot eyes, and yellow features so distorted and loathsome that no one can look upon them an instant without a scream of terror. Cut off from all association with man kind, the hideous giant resolves upon war against the whole human species and above all others against the man who had formed him and sent him forth to unsupportable misery.
One by one he slays, or brings to death from grief, all the members of Frankenstein's family and all his dearest friends including his bride. At last, Frankenstein, unable to overtake and kill the being fashioned by his hands, dies of exhaustion and remorse; and the monster, repentant for his crimes, disappears in the darkness of the northern seas.
In this romance, Mrs. Shelley reached the goal for which she set out — which was to write as horrible a tale as she had ever read. In her own words: "One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror— one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart." She also lived to know that she had added a new word to the English language. Frankenstein is now a synonym for a man whose own works bring him to disaster or destruction. And as the monster of the romance bears no name, the name of his creator has been often transferred to him so that "a Frankenstein" has come also to signify, in popular usage, a being of the most appalling ugliness and brutality, having no trace of the moral sense whatever.