How did Mary Shelley come up with the name Frankenstein?
Mary Shelley always maintained that she derived the name “Frankenstein” from a dream-vision, yet the name and what it means has been a source of many speculations. Literally, in German, the name Frankenstein means stone of the Franks. Frankenstein is the former name of Zbkowice Slaskie, a city in Silesia. There is a town called Frankenstein in the palatinate with Burg Frankenstein (Frankenstein Castle) and Burg Frankenstein near Darmstadt. Moreover Frankenstein is a common family name in Germany. More recently, Radu Florescu, in his In Search of Frankenstein, argued that Mary and Percy Shelley stayed at Castle Frankenstein on their way to Switzerland, near Darmstadt along the Rhine, where a notorious alchemist named Konrad Dippel had experimented with human bodies, but that Mary suppressed mentioning this visit, to maintain her public claim of originality.
