Prometheus Found

On the 30th August, 1797 the English author Mary Shelley was born. Her parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, were radicals and intellectuals standing on the cusp of a new world. It was the first stirrings of “the Enlightenment”, a rapidly progressive age of cultural, scientific innovation and political change. Europe was soon convulsed by revolution and counter revolution. The old certainties were waning and dramatically new ideas were emerging in their place.

It was also a fraught and uncertain time in history. Ideas were perceived as dangerous, treasonous, heretical or blasphemous but amidst danger there was a groundswell of hope. The changing social and political fortunes in France provided vital succour to intellectuals and artists who observed that dictatorial systems could founder and fairer, more equitable societies were possible.

However the French Revolution was not seamless, and despite the hopes and aspirations of the newly liberated people it quickly descended into anarchy and violence. It seems ironic to reflect that a political system that was supposedly driven by reason eventually transformed into an arena of chaos.

The violence and terror that was unleashed did not deter luminaries in this country from championing their cause. The “Lunar Society” in Birmingham were prominent supporters, as a collective of scientists and philosophers they had great sympathy with the grand ambitions of the French revolutionaries.

The British public, however, were not so enamoured by them and their presence provoked riots. When a celebratory dinner was held to mark the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, rioters broke into the house of Joseph Priestley and set fire to all of his furniture and books.

The riots continued for a week. Rioters daubed “Church and King for ever” on the walls. The continent of Europe was disintegrating, and there were genuine fears that the same devastating scenario would be replicated in England. Edmund Burke was one of the first to sound the warning bell. He outlined his many objections in a remarkably prescient letter to the Jacobite politician Lord Bolingbroke, written in 1757.

Burke’s words were prophetic, and it is incredible that he had enough foresight to realise what could happen in a post-revolutionary society. Utopia was a foolish pipe dream. He explains it all in startlingly lucid and convincing prose, clearly stating that “I have sometimes been in a good deal of doubt, whether the creator did ever really intend man for a state of happiness. He has mixed in his cup a number of natural evils (in spite of the boasts of stoicism they are evils) and every endeavour which the art and policy of mankind has used from the beginning of the world to this day, in order to alleviate, or cure them, has only served to introduce new mischiefs, or to aggravate and inflame the old”. Decades would pass before anyone took his warnings seriously.

In the meantime, scientists and philosophers continued in their ceaseless quest to perfect human society. It was met with a combination of admiration and scepticism. Coleridge was unimpressed, in spite of the initial enthusiasm expressed by his contemporary poet Wordsworth. He seriously doubted the claims made by these learned men and in a letter to him, he complained vociferously that the notion that, “Man’s having progressed from an Ouran Outang state is contrary to all history, to all religion, nay, to all possibility”. Such cynicism was common. However a young poet named Percy Shelley was inspired by the bold theories presented by the scientists and thinkers.

According to literary legend, Shelley recounted these alarming scientific discoveries to his wife on that stormy evening on Lake Geneva when the assembled guests of Lord Byron were challenged to conceive ghost stories. Mary Shelley, haunted by the notion that life could be manufactured by godless scientists with supernatural ambitions, was stricken with a nightmare. In her diary she remembered this dream of “a pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man…It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet”. Now we recognise “Frankenstein” as the embodiment of science divorced from human ethics, the personification of a mortal man believing himself to have Godlike powers. This novel continues to resonate today.