Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

"I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion." A summer evening's ghost stories, lonely insomnia in a moonlit Alpine's room, and a runaway imagination—fired by philosophical discussions with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley about science, galvanism, and the origins of life—conspired ...