Erasmus Darwin (The real source of 'Frankenstein' as well as Evolution)

Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin, was born near Nottingham on December 12, 1731. He was educated at Cambridge and Edinburgh and settled first near Lichfield and later at Derby.

A remarkable polymath, he became a best selling poet during the same years that he worked as a country doctor, naturalist, medical botanist, and inventor.

Darwin expounded one of the earliest theories of evolution ("all vegetables and animals now living were originally derived from the smallest microscopic ones"), and he described the importance of sexual selection to continuing changes within species ("the final cause of this contest among males seems to be, that the strongest and most active animal should propagate the species, which should thence become improved").

His two most important technical works are Zoonomia (1794), a medical textbook punctuated with reflections on philosophy, natural history, and human life and Phytologia (1800), a scientific discussion of agriculture and gardening.

His book length poems, The Botanic Garden (1789-91) and The Temple of Nature (1803), were widely read and even more widely discussed. His friends and associates included a pantheon of leading lights in a wide variety of fields: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Joseph Priestley, Josiah Wedgwood, James Watt, Dr. Johnson, the poet Anna Seward (who also wrote Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin), and R. L. Edgeworth, father of Maria.

Darwin was one of the founders of the well known Lunar Society, second only to the Royal Society in its importance as a gathering place for scientists, inventors, and natural philosophers during the second half of the eighteenth century.

He emphasized the role of sexuality in all reproduction and attributed the possibility of emotion to plants. He expressed great interest in the work of Volta and Galvani on muscular contraction, arguing in 1791 that electricity was the basis for all nerve impulses.

He recorded accurate observations on subjects as wide ranging as photosynthesis, neurology, meteorology, geology, and psychology. Often quoted poetic lines from Darwin's The Temple of Nature clearly anticipate the outlines of his grandson's theory by half a century:

Organic Life beneath the shoreless waves Was born and nurs'd in Ocean's pearly caves First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass, Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass; These, as successive generations bloom, New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume; Whence countless groups of vegetation spring, And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing. (1803)

Darwin exerted a powerful influence on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Mary Shelley among other literary figures. Wordsworth cited him as a source for "Goody Blake and Harry Gill" in Lyrical Ballads (1798) and Coleridge claimed that Darwin possessed "perhaps, a greater range of knowledge than any other man in Europe, and is the most inventive of philosophical men."

Coleridge, however, also coined the term darwinizing, meaning to speculate wildly, in reference to Darwin's evolutionary ideas.

In addition, Wordsworth and Coleridge clearly had Darwin, among others, in mind when they attacked the "gaudiness" of eighteenth-century poetic diction in the "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads. Darwin was also in the minds of the Shelley Circle (Mary, Percy, Lord Byron, Polidori) during the Frankenstein summer of 1816; he is referred to in Percy's "Preface" to the 1818 edition and in Mary's introduction to the 1831 edition of the novel.

Even Keats, who studied medicine before turning to poetry, was affected by the power of Darwin's ideas about an organic unity that linked plants, animals, and human beings. While the Romantics often criticized Darwin for his eighteenth-century poetic diction, his enthusiasm for materialist science, and the speculative aspects of some of his thinking, they were powerfully influenced by his view of the natural world and his belief in connections between human and nonhuman life. (A.N.)

As a Christian I was taught something very interesting about the Frankenstein story. That it was the godless folks favorite 'monster' story.

The reason? Because in the real story, the monster is actually a sweet pure man. He isn't bad. He's ugly, but not bad. He's created by a college student, not a mad scientist.

But, during the story, the man made from dead flesh, then animated to new life, is attacked by people. It is those attacks that drive the new man into monster mode. In other words, the monster evolved out of the flawless man.

As a Christian, we are taught that we are born as, for lack of a better term, the monster. The world doesn't make us bad. And the world can not make us good either.

But for the godless, reading this story gives them a validation of what they believe. They are truely good. It is the world that makes them do 'bad' things.

What I didn't know until I found this link was about how Mary Shelly, 18 years old, had witnessed experiments by Dr. Darwin, trying to animate life. I didn't know about Dr. Darwin's poem. I didn't understand how multi-generational these problems are...; for the Grandson today is the Father of Evolution.

But, with Christ, even this multi generational nonsense makes sense.

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