No kids get to go home from school. Precious few, but perhaps the most fervent will dress up with a flat-top haircut with bolts in their neck, more likely to save that for Halloween. It doesn’t appear on most calendars, and probably very few but the most ardent of fans know it at all. August 30th is rather unofficially, Frankenstein  Day. It doesn’t celebrate the creation of the monster, or the book, but the birth of the story’s author, Mary Shelley.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born on August 30, 1797 in a multiple residence (rather like a Regency era apartment building) called the Polygon, in Somers Town, London. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, wife of author and philosopher, William Godwin, died 10 days later of sepsis. Godwin did not believe in the institution of marriage in theory, but he married Wollstonecraft because society expected it. Her pain wracked lingering death was horrible for him, and his daughter, Mary Godwin, later to marry Percy Shelley, (he didn’t really believe philosophically in marriage either, although he did it twice) was deeply affected by not having a living birth mother and idolized her as an author (Vindication of the Rights of Woman) and free thinker for the rest of her life.

Much of the impetus of the story Mary Shelley developed into the tale of horror and philosophical life view we now know as “Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus” came from this longing for a parent who had abandoned her by death. Mary Shelley is virtually the mother of the Frankenstein Diaries, and August 30^th is also coincidentally my mother’s birthday, so, Happy Birthday, Moms!