9. Frankenstein’s Inspiration Came From Real-Life Grave-Digging
Mary Shelley, the author of the quintessential Gothic ghost story, Frankenstein, grew up in an era in which the only legal means of acquiring bodies for medical research was from the gallows. As a deterrent to committing more sinister crimes, such as murder, criminals were not only hung but their bodies dismembered and sold to medical institutions, especially schools. The deterrent may have been somewhat effective, as there were never enough dead bodies to satisfy the needs of medical students. Enter the profession of grave digging, when real-life body snatchers were paid to dig up the freshly-buried bodies.
This ignoble profession served as the inspiration for how the monster in Frankenstein was created: the mad scientist, Dr. Victor Frankenstein, becomes so obsessed in his quest to create the perfect human that he exhumes dead bodies and uses their parts to make his creature. In fact, Mary Shelley and her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, often met up in London’s St. Pancras cemetery, a place that was well-known for grave digging. No doubt their courtship was filled with telling ghost stories to each other that were based on the happenings at the cemetery. There is speculation that the body of Mary’s mother, who died when she was young, was snatched and thereafter dismembered.
