I love Halloween. I love it more than any other holiday. Other occasions are more important, solemn or significant, but Halloween is the most fun. There are no gift obligations and no accompanying worries about how that gift is going to be accepted or compared to other gifts as there are at Christmas. There are no annoying relatives involved or romantic expectations that are at the heart of other holidays – like Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day.
When I was a history teacher at Mitchell High School, I had a day of teaching the History of Halloween as well as Thanksgiving and Christmas in the appropriate season. It wasn’t just fun and games. Those days explained the history behind the traditions and practices of those commemorations. Much of what we do is rooted in the past, some of the things we do are based on myth and others on the understanding of the people who lived long ago that we have adopted into our traditions.
Even the monsters of Halloween have a basis in fact. Mary Shelley was visiting for the weekend, an English tradition at the time, with her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley (the famous poet) at the home of Lord Byron (another famous poet). There were other guests there as well. It was about this time of year and their host, Lord Byron, proposed a “write off”. Each guest was to write a ghost story and the best story would be proclaimed the winner. They all accepted the bet and Frankenstein was born. Mary Shelley won, the year of the bet was 1816 and the full novel, developed from that short story composed during that English weekend, was published January 1, 1818.
Frankenstein is the name of the doctor; the monster is identified only as “the Creature”. The novel is sometimes referred to as the “modern Prometheus” in English courses at colleges around the country today. Prometheus was the person in Greek mythology who stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. His punishment was to live forever and have his liver torn out daily by birds of prey only to have that gruesome fate happen over and over again. Dr. Victor Frankenstein, in the novel, attempts to create “eternal life” by reanimating dead body parts into living, breathing life again.
This concept is loosely based on grave robbing that was popular in the 18th and 19th centuries. Corpses were stolen and sold to medical schools for the edification of medical students. These grave robbers called themselves “Resurrectionists”, the general public called them reprehensible. The more honorable of these resurrectionists only stole the bodies. They left the wedding rings and other valuables of the dead behind as well as recovered the grave – out of respect for the departed’s families as well as a desire not to be caught, covering their tracks in a matter of speaking. Those with fewer scruples sold the bodies to medical schools and kept the booty for themselves.
The medical schools accepted the bodies on a “no questions asked” basis. The fiction was that the dead had donated their bodies to science. That is an option for people today. When my wife was a science teacher at MHS she took Advanced Biology students on a field trip to the cadaver labs at SDSU and USD (they visited one a year, but which depended on conditions and circumstances at the labs as to availability to non-medical students). Of course, the medical schools accepting grave robbers’ corpses ignored the obvious deterioration of the bodies, which would indicate they were dug up rather than delivered immediately upon expiration. Although embalming was available, it was expensive and beyond the reach of the average citizen. Besides, the dead were buried quickly so why “waste” the money on embalming was the philosophy of most families.
The Resurrectionists watched the obituaries for prospects. They paid Rectors and Vicars to alert them to when parishioners were to be buried. It wasn’t until 1832 that the theft of bodies was made illegal in Great Britain, where the author of Frankenstein – Mary Shelley lived. Stealing valuables from the dead was always illegal, as that was theft but the body itself had “no value” and didn’t belong to anyone so it was “finders keepers, losers weepers” for the most part, although morally it was frowned upon.
When Frankenstein came out, it resonated with people because of grave robbing. The first successful organ transplant was in 1954 when 49 year old Ruth Tucker received a kidney at a hospital in Evergreen Park, Illinois. However, the dream of organ transplants was heavy on the minds of people in the 18th and 19th century. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the Sherlock Holmes story, The Adventure of the Creeping Man, which involved the injection of monkey glands to stay young and vital. Doyle was a medical doctor familiar with past infatuations and medical fads to prolong human life. He also had an intense interest in contacting the newly deceased via seances. Doyle was an advocate of life after death and the ability of the living to communicate with their dearly departed. Magician Harry Houdini made it a lifelong practice to discredit these charlatans preying on the grieving with their bogus contacts, seances and channeling of the spirits of the dead.
Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein when she was 18. The monster is called “The Creature” in the book. The language is a bit dated, having been written two hundred years ago, but the novel is still a good read. It is more than just a horror story. It is filled with deeper meaning, wrestling with the concept of, “if you can do something does that mean you should?” That notion applies today to things like cloning, Artificial Intelligence, and genetic engineering. If you’re looking for a Halloween read this October, you can’t go wrong with this classic.