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The name "Frankenstein" is famous enough to have entered popular culture, even if people often get confused about whether it refers to the scientist or the monster. But where did Mary Shelley get this name from? Did it come from a particular real-life person, a local legend from somewhere in Europe, some significant hidden meaning? Surely it's more than just a random German-sounding name?

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In short, there are countless theories for the origin of the name "Frankenstein". One thing that they all have in common is either a severe lack of evidence, or the evidence being of dubious veracity (see the Scheele theory below for a particularly extreme example of this). Until some new evidence is uncovered, it seems that this question will remain unanswerable — pick whichever theory you personally find most plausible!

  • One of the earliest suggestions was made by Walter E. Peck in his biography of Shelley, Shelley, His Life and Work (1927), which was that it originated from character names in Monk Lewis' tales:

    The names Frankheim and Falkenstein from Monk Lewis’s tales probably supplied Mary Shelley ... with the title for her romance.

    and so "Frankenstein" arose from joining or modifying these names, possibly to make it sound more imposing or Gothic. We can confirm from her journal that Mary Shelley had read Monk Lewis' Tales of Terror; Tales of Wonder; Romantic Tales in 1815, the year before she began writing Frankenstein, so this suggestion is at least plausible, even though it lacks evidence that it was the actual route with which she came up with the name.

  • In 1968 the American writer Samuel Rosenberg suggested instead that the name derives from the hero of Percy Shelley's 1810 novel St. Irvyne, who was named "Wolfstein". The substitution of "Wolf" for "Franken" was explained as a homage to Benjamin Franklin, whose experiments with electricity had impressed Shelley, leading him to call him a "Prometheus". Given that the subtitle of Frankenstein was also "the modern Prometheus", Rosenberg argued that Frankenstein was a combination of Franklin plus Wolfstein. Again, however, there is no documentary evidence to support this theory.

"Frankenstein" is not a particularly uncommon name in Germany, so there is no need for Mary to have invented it — it is possible that she heard it somewhere, remembered it, and used it either consciously or subconsciously as the name of the hero of her novel. This leads to one of the most popular theories for the origin of the name:

  • that Mary visited a place called Castle Frankenstein, and/or heard local legends about the castle and the Frankenstein family during a trip around Europe in 1814.

    This has become an extremely popular explanation, and is, for example, quoted in the Wikipedia entry for Castle Frankenstein. The theory has become considerably elaborated over the years, so it is worth breaking down its development.

1. The basic facts

An account of her journey, made with Percy Shelley and her half-sister Claire Clairmont, was published in 1817 under the title History of a Six Weeks' Tour. While travelling down the Rhine the party passed close to two places named Frankenstein: one near Kaiserslautern, some 40 km from the Rhine, and the other near Darmstadt and somewhat closer. The History records this part of the trip as:

The country was uninteresting, but we enjoyed fine weather, and slept in the boat in the open air without any inconvenience. We saw on the shores few objects that called forth our attention, if I except the town of Manheim, which was strikingly neat and clean. It was situated at about a mile from the river, and the road to it was planted on each side with beautiful acacias.

making no mention of either of the castles, and just writing that the German landscape was "uninteresting". Mary and Claire both noted in their journals that the boat was delayed for a few hours just north of Mannheim, and in The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein (2007) Dorothy and Tom Hoobler write:

they reached the town of Gernsheim [a few miles north of Mannheim] in the afternoon of September 2. For some reason, the operator of the boat insisted on staying there until the moon rose. That gave Mary and Percy three hours to explore the area. They saw nothing they thought worthy of mention in their journal, which they still kept jointly.

2. They were near Castle Frankenstein, so they must have seen and heard about it

The Hooblers go on to claim:

However, they must certainly have seen one of the most notable sights in the vicinity: the ruins of Castle Frankenstein

That "they must certainly have seen" the castle seems to be an excessively strong interpretation of the incident. The castle is about 16 km from the river, and as Michael Mueller noted in his rebuttal of this theory "you can hardly find the castle with the naked eye; even by daylight" let alone in the late evening/night when the Shelleys were there.

The novelist Miranda Seymour describes the event in similar terms in her 2002 biography Mary Shelley, writing that the Shelleys left the boat for three hours "long enough to explore the surrounding foothills and, very possibly, to learn some of the folk tales and legends of the area" [my bolding]. This is no more than another plausibility argument — just because they happened to be in the vicinity of the castle certainly doesn't mean that they saw it or heard anything about it. It's an interesting speculation, but completely undocumented.

3. Further elaboration: they must have visited the castle too

One reason that people are so eager to emphasise this brief stop in the vicinity of Castle Frankenstein is that an alchemist named Johann Konrad Dippel lived there in the seventeenth century. Among other things he sought the elixir of life, and is reputed to have performed experiments on cadavers, which have led some to theorise that as well as the castle providing Mary with the name, the life of Dippel inspired the novel itself. This view was put forcefully by Radu Florescu in his 1975 work In Search of Frankenstein, writing:

it seems unlikely that the parallels between the castle, Dippel, and Mary Shelley’s novel are mere coincidence.

and goes beyond the Hooblers and Seymour by claiming not only that the Shelleys were in the general vicinity of the castle, but that they would actually have visited it:

Mary and Percy had ample time... and that, given their motivation and proximity, Mary and Shelley could have visited Castle Frankenstein on the night of September 2nd, 1814.

"Ample time" seems an exaggeration. Three hours is certainly insufficient to walk 16 km there, 16 km back, and tour the ruins. Hiring a coach to make the trip more quickly also seems unconvincing. The travelers were chronically short of money, and it is hard to see why they would behave so extravagantly to fill a hiatus of a few hours. It is also strange that this trip would not be mentioned in their journals. Florescu accounts for this by saying that the journals were deliberately edited to remove this information, so that Mary could take full credit for inventing the Frankenstein story.

4. The last step: fake evidence

Having taken the first steps into conspiracy theory territory, we can proceed further with Walter Scheele's Burg Frankenstein (2015). He claims not only that Mary and Claire's journals were tampered with, but that he has seen the missing pages which detail their trip to the castle. He alleges that the papers are in the possession of a secretive Swiss family who "let nobody see the diary and don’t want to publish any information about the past". Nonetheless after much pleading they allowed him to view the fateful entry from Mary's journal:

The Frankenstein Castle: A monumental building, full of darkness; broken walls, mysterical-mighty in the sobering Novembermist — but wonderful shining under the bright moon. Allowing an amazing country-view over the Rhine-river to the blue mountains on the other side of the river and a church to be seen over the silvershining waters.

The rather wobbly English alone is enough to make one hesitate to accept this, let alone Scheele's theatrical references to a secretive owner who lets no one see the truth. Nonetheless, this has allowed Scheele to eke out a living presenting TV spots about the true origin of the Frankenstein story, and acting as a tour guide at the castle. It is hard not to concur with the opinion of the Frankenstein expert Leonard Wolf who calls this an "unconvincing... conspiracy theory".

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  • Thank you, this is great! Not sure if you knew this when you answered, but this question is among my list to bounty, so I'll probably be making an exception to my general principle on this site of only giving bounties to people who don't have all the rep-based moderation privileges yet :-) Commented Nov 15, 2024 at 16:53
  • 'a secretive Swiss family who "let nobody see the diary and don’t want to publish any information about the past"'. LOL! Henry James wants The Aspern Papers back! Commented Nov 15, 2024 at 17:22
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    @Laurel Stack Exchange isn't really designed to use headings (not to be confused with headers!) inside answers, even though the markdown allows it. With the h2 headings you've introduced, the headings "1. The basic facts" etc are hierarchically at the same level as the heading "2 Answers" (which is under SE's control). That doesn't make much sense. Commented Nov 16, 2024 at 13:29
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    Florescu's idea that "the journals were deliberately edited ... so that Mary could take full credit for inventing the Frankenstein story" seems anachronistic. Credit for originality was not so important at that time. If Mary had known about Dippel, I imagine that she would have referenced him in the novel, to add verisimilitude. Commented Nov 16, 2024 at 13:43
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    @GarethRees Florescu's view is that Mary wanted to take all the credit for (literally) dreaming the story up, and so would try to suppress any mention of other sources of inspiration. Yup, it's not very convincing, but he needed a motive for her to remove pages from her journal. Commented Nov 16, 2024 at 14:01
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An easy might-be-true answer is in Wikipedia: from Burg Frankenstein, a castle in Germany, where your predecessors conjectured Shelley visited and possibly drew inspiration from the castle's legends.

This story is not universally believed, however. See the essay "Frankenstein – the monster’s home?" by Michael Mueller for a forceful denial of every insinuation found in the Wikipedia article.

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    What is your source for this? Is there anything by Mary Shelley which says she visited the castle? Commented Sep 3, 2018 at 1:41
  • The web page in my answer, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein_Castle . It seems there is a long-standing version of this hokey-sounding story. Just because it's in Wikipedia doesn't automatically mean its false... Commented Sep 3, 2018 at 2:34
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    I didn't say it was false. I commented because it's preferable to have your references in your answer, because if the link ever goes down, your answer will lose some of its value. Commented Sep 3, 2018 at 2:44
  • @Gallifreyan , I have added another fragile link. I am flattered that you posit some value to my answer, but am comfortable with the risk that its value might diminish. Commented Sep 3, 2018 at 2:58
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    This is a decent theory (although as @Gall said, your answer would be improved by including the evidence here rather than sending the reader elsewhere to find it). Are there any other plausible theories about the origin of the name? Commented Sep 4, 2018 at 22:24
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For more than two centuries, the origin of the name Frankenstein has intrigued scholars and readers alike. The dominant theory links it to a German castle overlooking the Rhine, supposedly glimpsed by Mary and Percy Shelley in 1814—a seductive but unproven hypothesis. Yet another possibility emerges: an Italian one.

In April 2023, during my honeymoon in Tuscany, I stumbled upon a cooking class in a small, unknown village—Montefoscoli. The owner, Marcella, showed us a red-terracotta temple built in the 19th century by Andrea Vaccà Berlinghieri, a professor of medicine in Pisa, in honor of his father Francesco, also a renowned surgeon. Before we left, she mentioned: “Mary and Percy Shelley came here.”

I froze. I had been researching Mary Shelley’s Italian years for over a year. By pure coincidence, I had found myself walking in her footsteps. Later, while visiting the Vaccà family home, I discovered a collection of surgical instruments designed by Francesco. A friend mentioned a local rumor: Francesco had once been nicknamed Frank the Stone—Francesco La Pietra—for his studies on kidney stones. Stone translates to Stein in German. The connection was irresistible: Frank the Stone → Frankenstein.

An amusing coincidence—but one that sparked an intuition. Could this be the true origin of Mary Shelley’s name for her scientist? There was a problem, however: Mary did not visit Pisa until 1820, four years after writing Frankenstein. Still, I followed the trail. The Vaccà family, I discovered, were involved as early as 1792 in debates on “animal electricity.” Leopoldo Vaccà, Andrea’s brother, had developed a theory of “nervous fluid”—a vital energy capable of animating inert matter.

The image of Victor Frankenstein suddenly made sense: not harnessing lightning, but seeking that vital spark. The hypothesis was no longer a pun; it tied real scientific ideas to Shelley’s fiction. Andrea Vaccà himself appears in Mary’s journals: he treated Percy and Claire Clairmont in Pisa between 1820 and 1822 and became a close friend. Mary described him as “sympathetic,” “republican,” and “not at all Christian.” He moved in literary circles, treated the poor for free, and hosted gatherings of Tuscany’s intellectual elite.

He was even present at Percy’s cremation in Viareggio. When Trelawny brought Mary her husband’s unburned heart, Andrea Vaccà was there—a sign of his closeness to the couple. Perhaps Mary later paid him discreet tribute through her character’s name.

But the chronology still raised doubts: how could Mary have known the nickname Frank the Stone before 1820? Then came a clue. The Montefoscoli temple, inaugurated in 1823, bore an inscription celebrating medicine and family legacy. The Shelleys were meant to attend, but Percy was dead, and Mary back in London. Who, then, might have heard that nickname earlier?

One name resurfaced: John William Polidori—the doctor of Lord Byron and author of The Vampyre—who spent the summer of 1816 with the Shelleys at Villa Diodati. If he had known the Vaccàs, he could have transmitted the nickname. But Polidori died in 1821—two years too soon.

That led me to another figure: his father, Gaetano Polidori, a former student at the University of Pisa and secretary to playwright Alfieri. In 1789, Gaetano stayed in Paris with the brothers Andrea and Leopoldo Vaccà, and they became friends. Before John left for Italy in 1816, his father wrote: “Go see Andrea Vaccà; he will welcome you as a son.”

In Pisa, John attended his lectures, dined with his family, and wrote to Byron: “Vacca, the first surgeon in Italy, has received me as a son and an old friend of my father.” Andrea became his mentor—combining scientific reason with Italian passion.

Polidori was the only physician among the Diodati circle. His conversations with Percy and Mary about “the vital principle” could have been the very discussion Mary recalled in her preface to Frankenstein. It was Polidori who spoke of galvanism, reanimation, and the spark between body and consciousness. Through him, the Vaccàs’ Italian theories could have reached Mary Shelley.

The hypothesis thus gains coherence: Frankenstein may not derive from a German castle but from an Italian network of scientists and thinkers. The name Frank the Stone could even be a coded homage to a doctor who embodied both science and compassion for the Shelleys.

This interpretation does not exclude others—the Rhineland castle, the literary sources—but it opens a new perspective, at the crossroads of science history and Romantic imagination: perhaps Frankenstein is, after all, also an Italian story.

This interpretation does not exclude others—the Rhineland castle, the literary sources—but it opens a new perspective, at the crossroads of science history and Romantic imagination: perhaps Frankenstein is, after all, also an Italian story.

Those interested in exploring this hypothesis further can join the discussion group on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1224854282450810 .

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