(1764–1834). He is considered part of the reformists and utopians projecting a society based on an egalitarian system, against whom the economist Malthus (1766–1834) wrote. Thelwall [THE 02] used electricity to argue for the material basis of life and human rights as a natural consequence of the laws of nature. While electricity was a sign of scientific progress, it became a paradigm for political progress:
Machines appeared to provide a concrete way of articulating and making sense of new relationships between natural and political economies, between human labour and the natural forces increasingly being harnessed to power industrial progress. From this perspective, the human body itself could be regarded as a machine, embodying the newly articulated doctrine of the conservation of energy in just the same way as did an electric battery or a steam engine. [RHY 99, p. 249]
This inscription of the history of electricity in the post-revolutionary context makes it possible to understand to what extent the craze that it provoked symbolized the advent of a society marked by the progress of technology. The passage in Mary Shelley’s novel in which the scientist, Victor Frankenstein, explains how he glimpsed the links between light and the possibility of animating matter offers several interpretations. The most likely is the link between natural electricity such as lightning and the vital spark that animates matter in vivo:
[…] from the midst of this darkness, a sudden light broke in upon me – a light so brilliant and wondrous, yet so simple, that while I became dizzy with the immensity of the prospect which it illustrated, I was surprised that among so many men of genius who had directed their inquiries towards the same science, that I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret. Remember, I am not recording the vision of a madman. The sun does not more certainly shine in the heavens than that which I now affirm is true. Some miracle might have produced it, yet the stages of the discovery were distinct and probable. After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter. [SHE 18, pp. 75–76]11
Shelley’s text is not without ambivalence on the technical aspects. As mentioned above, her father was a supporter of galvanism. Her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), took part in lively debates, notably with Dr. William Lawrence (1783–1867), on the physical origins of life and the possibility of sparks bringing the dead back to life. The novel Frankenstein represents the fascination for the possibility of artificially creating life, but also, and perhaps above all, a surpassing of the dualism present in the fact of animating human automatons, insofar as the creature is not a machine but possesses a consciousness embodied in its matter. Mary Shelley, in a holism and materialism in which spirit is generated by matter, linked the organic parts from which the creature is formed, coming from different criminals, and their influence on consciousness. From the project of distinguishing the stages that range from life to death, the powerful myth of making life or giving it to organic matter in its modern, technical and progressive version, represented in the Frankenstein epic where materialism is next to the technical power of Man, was born:
From the suggestion of these experiments came a wide range of Gothic literature, especially in Germany, England and America, of which the most famous expression, but also the most open to multiple interpretations, was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. [FRE 14, p. 254, author’s translation]
Thus the exploration of the possibilities of reanimating matter had clearly taken hold of many experimenters in medical electricity. The voltaic pile, symbol of major technical progress, made the hand of the modern Prometheus powerful. Works of fiction on these issues were not uncommon and some can be considered gems of the genre. Here is an excerpt from a play, published in 1854, symbolizing the fascination and fear of galvanism but also the human ambiguity of its position in nature. The scene takes place in Bologna, in 1797:
(Galvani alone, sitting by the table.) Bringing the dead back to life! Recalling the divine breath in an inanimate body! O thought of breaking the brain! A thought that contains a hundred times more pride than it took to lose the first man! Giving life to the dead! But it is to want to correct the work of God; to want to be God himself! And yet, it is certain that since the earth has been turning, there has been a misunderstanding between the Creator and his noblest creature: that one should die when one has reached the limits of extreme old age, when the springs of the organism are worn out, one understands it: this is the universal law; but in the prime of life, in the flower of youth, to die! To die altogether is a nonsense that God did not commit. [AND 54, p. 3, author’s translation]
In the rest of the story, a murder and a galvanic resurrection are staged during which a female character stands at one end of a semi-organic circuit with a Leyden jar and transmits the electric fluid to her lover’s lifeless body, under the instructions of the doctor [AND 54, p. 123].
Another renowned author, who was not insensitive to the electric imaginary and the Promethean culture that emerged from it, is Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849). An assiduous reader of the Medico-Chirurgical Journal; or, London Medical and Surgical Review edited by Dr. James Johnson (1777–1845) and published between 1820 and 1847, and of the famous medical journal The Lancet, he dispersed in his tales and essays episodes of galvanism or dead people coming back to life, not without a certain irony.
In his 1844 short story “The Premature Burial”, he captures the societal anguish of being buried alive and emphasizes the galvanic apparatus as a diagnostic tool for death:
The mention of the galvanic battery, nevertheless, recalls to my memory a well known and very extraordinary case in point, where its action proved the means of restoring to animation a young attorney of London, who had been interred for two days. This occurred in 1831 and created, at the time, a very profound sensation where it was made the subject of converse. The patient, Mr. Edward Stapleton, had died, apparently of typhus fever, accompanied with some anomalous symptoms which had excited the curiosity of his medical attendants […]. An incision of some extent had been actually made in the abdomen, when the fresh and undecayed appearance of the subject suggested an application of the battery. One experiment succeeded another, and the customary effects supervened, with nothing to characterize them in any respect, except, upon one or two occasions, a more than ordinary degree of life-likeness in the convulsive action. It grew late. The day was about to dawn; and it was thought expedient, at length, to proceed at once to the dissection. One student, however, was especially desirous of testing a theory of his own, and insisted upon applying the battery to one of the pectoral muscles. A rough gash was made, and a wire hastily brought in contact, when the patient, with a hurried but quite unconvulsive movement, arose from the table, stepped into the middle of the floor, gazed about him uneasily for a few seconds, and then spoke. What he said was unintelligible, but words were uttered; the syllabification was distinct. Having spoken, he fell heavily to the floor. [POE 44, pp. 757–758]
The theatricalization underlines the stupor of the subject who awakened fully conscious, differentiating him from the automaton to which mobility is infused in the experiments of Aldini or Ure. The body was clearly not brought back to life since it did not bear the post-mortem alterations. So he was alive but unconscious. Beyond the literary aspects, galvanization was rationally applied to a body that could not be considered dead. The point here is to differentiate between galvanic culture and the imaginary symbolized by the novel Frankenstein. Another of Poe’s texts will help us to make this distinction. In Some Words With a Mummy [POE 45], he recounts, not without humor, the case, much closer to the myth than to a societal application of galvanism, of a mummy three or four thousand years old. His nerves exposed and feeling the first effects of the application of a galvanic cell caused movements very close to Aldini’s descriptions of the tortured corpses. Absorbing contractions of the palpebral muscles and lower limbs, the mummy ended up giving a strong kick to a scientist. The fictitious dimension made it possible to go further than the description of automatic movements. This text refers to the popular fear of the dead returning from the dead, the novelty of which
