Gloomy summer that created a giant hit with a life of its own

If it hadn’t been for a poor summer Frankestein might never have been born.

In 1815 Indonesia witnessed its largest volcanic eruption for more than 1,600 years and the following year the northern hemisphere was plunged into a freakishly cool and sunless summer.

On the shores of Lake Geneva, the miserable weather kept five British tourists cooped up inside a villa for days, where they passed the time with a horror story-writing competition.

The entry by 19-year-old Mary Godwin, soon to be Mary Shelley, was the tale of a “hideous phantasm of a man” and his creator, the scientist Victor Frankenstein, who is so horrified by the creature he brings to live he abandons him with terrible consequences.

When the holiday was over, most of the guests forgot about the competition they’d held, but Shelley expanded the tale into a novel, published anonymously in 1818. A legend was born and it wasn’t long before literature’s great and good began to read it as something other than a simple horror story.

Over the past 200 years, it has been seen as a dramatisation of the Fall of Man, embraced by opponents of Irish nationalism and some have even read it as analysis of post-natal depression and evidence of Godwin’s own guilt over the death of her mother who died just days after she was born.

“With terms like Frankenstein foods, the name of the novel has become a byword for bad science, but the metaphor is unfair,” says Angela Wright, a lecturer in Romantic literature at the University of Sheffield. “There is evidence that Shelley was deeply interested in science and she was aware of the work of two Edinburgh doctors who were working in dissection theatres on the reanimation of corpses.

“While she believed in the sanctity of human life and thought these people had crossed a line, she had a lot of admiration for scientific thought in general.”

If some academic circles have been guilty of taking Frankenstein a little too seriously, at the other end of the spectrum lies a dozen or more film directors. It was back in 1931 that Boris Karloff first played the monster on celluloid and while he bore little resemblance to the creature described by Shelley, until recently it seemed the image of the lumbering giant with a bolt through its neck was destined to live on forever.

However, with Frankenstein’s monster undergoing not one, but two 21st-century makeovers it seems that he might yet cast off the nuts and bolts.

Under the creative eye of film director Danny Boyle, a stage production has not only proved a big hit at the National Theatre, but with live performances being screened in cinemas this month it’s also likely to be a box office success. With Jonny Lee Miller and current screen favourite Benedict Cumberpatch alternating roles as the scientist and monster, the critics have been falling over themselves to heaped praise on the production, its stirring music and at times disturbing special effects – the first 10 minutes are devoted to the creature’s emergence from a giant papery cocoon.

The Live at Leeds version, which takes the original novel and runs with it, may not have been blessed with the same production budget as Boyle, but as Frankenstein takes to the streets of Leeds, what’s certain is that almost 200 years after it was first written, the monster has retained his power to thrill.