The English spa town of Bath has a new museum with a double-bill focus: Mary Shelley, who wrote her most famous novel there, and the iconic character she created, Dr. Victor Frankenstein. It’s apparently not really clear who gets top billing, although it’s officially ‘Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein.’
The privately-financed venture by two film-and-theatre veterans includes both material on Shelley’s extended but not quite happy stay in Bath, and a potpourri of customized room scents, electric shock displays, an 8-foot-high automaton and some live-action actors. It’s in a Georgian townhouse not far from the Jane Austen Centre.
Shelley’s time in Bath was a troubled one; she arrived in 1816, aged 19 and ostracized as the mother of the poet Shelley’s illegitimate children; her step-sister and companion Claire Clairmont was pregnant with a child by Lord Byron. Neither was interested in fashion or fashionable people and some say she hated her time there.
But, as they say, that’s Hollywood!
