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And just like the story of Pandora’s box, once the secrets are unleashed, there is no way back. Frankenstein - the “Modern Prometheus” - laboured under morally justifiable grounds to uncover the secrets of the gods only to birth a tragedy.
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While Frankenstein’s subject matter of a reanimated corpse may seem quaint, its warning of the danger of science unleashed remains relevant. Unlike Pandora who unleashed the horrors of humanity through sheer curiosity, Shelley’s eponymous protagonist Dr. The plot is sensational - at least for its time - but the philosophical questions raised by the novel continues to challenge contemporary readers. Frankenstein initially agrees but cannot bring himself to create a second creature, subsequently causing the Creature to kill his fiancee Elizabeth. Enraged by his abandonment, the Creature kills Frankenstein’s young brother William in revenge, and threatens further harm unless the scientist created him a mate. Spurned by his creator, the Creature turns to others for succour but kindness does not come easy for the aberration. But as with all newborns, the Creature yearns for love and acceptance. A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch.įrankenstein turns his back on his creation. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart… Oh! No mortal could support the horror of that countenance. Unable to accept her death, Frankenstein dedicates himself to the search for the immortal spark of life.įrankenstein’s obsessive labours are successful but rather than the creature of beauty he had envisioned as his aim, he creates a hideous, distended monster which immediately brings about profound feelings of disgust and regret: His scientific investigations are turned towards the search for the mystery of life when his mother dies suddenly of scarlet fever. Three and a half years earlier I had set out to create something beautiful.Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus, published 200 years ago on Jan 1, 1818, is still among the foremost novels dealing with the themes of unfettered human creativity and the consequences thereof.įrankenstein, for the uninitiated, is the story of Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant chemist obsessed with reproducing natural miracles. Every page seemed to bring a fresh disaster a grammatical error here, a missing footnote there, and so many sentences that I longed to rewrite. It had been more than a month since I had last read my thesis, but in preparation for the big event I plucked up the courage to have a final look. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room." I was reminded of this passage a few weeks ago on the morning of my PhD viva.
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He is driven by an insatiable appetite for discovery, but when he finally witnesses the results of his labours he is filled with an overpowering sense of dread: "I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. In Mary Shelley's version of the story, Victor Frankenstein locks himself in a laboratory for two years in order to pursue his scientific research. More interestingly, it promises researchers the opportunity to subject these sources to some interesting new forms of qualitative and quantitative analysis.
I had desired it with an ardour archive#
This recently launched project follows in the footsteps of its eighteenth-century predecessor and, in the words of its publisher Gale Cengage, aims to be "the most ambitious scholarly digitisation and publication program ever undertaken." The archive will contain millions of pages of nineteenth-century books, periodicals, diaries, letters, manuscripts, photographs, government records, pamphlets, and maps.
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Enter Nineteenth Century Collections Online. The unparalleled breadth of its coverage - along with the number of university libraries that took up subscriptions - quickly established it as a key focal point for the researching and teaching of eighteenth-century history.In other words, it's a tough act to follow. This ambitious project aimed to digitise "every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in Great Britain during the eighteenth century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas." The definition of a 'significant' text remains open to interpretation, but the contents of the archive are undeniably impressive - in its present form it contains more than 180,000 titles. It's been nearly ten years since the launch of Eighteenth Century Collections Online.