In May 1799, Maria Edgeworth wrote to Margaret Ruxton about a young man performing wonders with the use of certain gases, bringing ‘pleasure even to madness’. Yet ‘faith, great faith’, she added, was ‘necessary to produce any effect upon the drinkers’, and some of ‘the adventurous philosophers’ only found ‘a sick stomach and a giddy head’ while breathing factitious airs (Edgeworth 1894, 66). Maria Edgeworth, Dr Beddoes's sister-in-law, was part of the Bristolian circle of radical scientists, physiologists and writers who, in 1799, tested the use of gases, or ‘aeriform fluids’ (pure oxygen, nitrous oxide, nitrous gas and pure hydrocarbonate) at the Pneumatic Institution in Clifton, Bristol. As her letter suggests, the factitious airs produced unpredictable reactions on the test subjects; some of them would experience exquisite pleasure, usually the second phase of symptom expression, while others simply suffered from bodily symptoms. The discovery that air, atmospheric or decomposed, mingled with blood and acted on nerves, muscles and thoughts, and had the power to alter the state of consciousness, sparked fascinating debates between scientists and poets on the creative process at work when external agents meet internal organs.

This chapter intends to examine the experiments conducted on one of the first natural agents that the reader encounters in Frankenstein, namely air. As Robert Walton is heading for the pole, he writes that he feels ‘a cold northern breeze play upon [his] cheeks, which braces [his] nerves, and fills [him] with delight’ (Shelley 2012, 7). This ‘wind of promise’ acting on his nerves also stimulates the content and intensity of his ‘day dreams’ as they ‘become more fervent and vivid’ (Shelley 2012, 7). In her 1831 ‘Introduction’, Mary Shelley also reflects on her childhood dreamlike wanderings and the pleasure she indulged in when building ‘castles in air’, ‘following up trains of thought, which had for their subject the formation of a succession of imaginary incidents’ (Shelley 2012, 165).

The question of the status of these ‘airy flights of imagination’ born from an ‘unbidden’ imagination (Shelley 2012, 166, 168) was a harrowing question that many poets voiced through their fictive creations.