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bronze plaque · England

Mary Shelley

Photograph at the Mary Shelley bronze plaque

Mary Shelley and 'Frankenstein'. The novel 'Frankenstein' was written on this spot in 1816-17. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, aged 19, arrived in Bath in September 1816 and took lodgings here at 5 Abbey Church Yard. That house was demolished to make way for the Pump Room extension in the 1890s. She attended scientific lectures by Dr Wilkinson in the nearby Kingston Lecture Room. he suggested that one day electricity might be used to bring inanimate matter to life. this idea resonated with Mary, who had recently experienced nightmares in thunderstorms and inspired her to write 'Frankenstein'. Mary married the poet Percy Shelly in December 1816. When she left Bath early in 1817 much of the novel had been written. It was published anonymously in London in January 1818. Coincidentally there is now a vault beneath this sign containing an electricity sub-station that delivers thousands of volts to central Bath.

Inscription drawn from imported open data, awaiting original TributeLegacy editorial.

Source: Open Plaques. Geographic data via OpenStreetMap.

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Location records are drawn from open, licence-clean datasets, kept here with attribution and gratitude to the people who maintain them.

  • Open Plaques, dedicated to the public domain (CC0). See openplaques.org.
  • Wikidata, available under the CC0 1.0 Universal dedication.
  • © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence.
  • Historic England, National Heritage List for England, used under the Open Government Licence v3.0. War memorial records are drawn from open community datasets (OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, NHLE) — never from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which is excluded.

Editorial descriptions, photography and tribute links are original TributeLegacy work, layered on top of the open data.

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