The Monsters

Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler wrote an interesting background story about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein entitled The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein

I’m currently reading it and can already recommend it. Quite fascinating. These are some really screwed-up people! Fun, though.

For example, you may be familiar with the term antimacassar, a washable cloth placed on furniture. Turns out that Lord Byron provided the need for this invention. He used Macassar oil to make his hair gleam. Lord Byron was the Mick Jagger of his day, famous throughout the western world for both his beauty and his poetry. So all the young rakes imitated his dress and style… including his use of Macassar oil. Fastidious housewives were forced to protect their furniture from this greasy stuff by placing cloths, anti-macassars, on the backs of the chairs and sofas. The use of Macassar oil, a palm-oil based concoction that most likely had no connection to Makassar (a city in Indonesia), passed long before the usage of the little cloths.

Read the book to discover the characters of all the people central to the writing of the book. Mary Shelley’s infamous parents, her step-sister with whom she unwillingly shared her husband’s affections, Thomas Jefferson Hogg – Shelley’s best friend with whom he tried, unsuccessfully, to intimately share all the ladies in his life, Lord Byron – who issued the challenge on that ‘dark and stormy night’ that all present write a ghost story, and Dr. Polidori who rose to the challenge by writing the world’s first vampire story, The Vampyre.