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Journal of Nellie Bly, 1890


Before I went to England early in the year, I had heard tales of the haunted moors of Dartmoor, that bleak, windswept land where strange creatures are said to roam on moonless nights, but nothing prepared me for murder and science gone mad as men tempted the heavens by trying to create in a test tube that which only God possesses the right to do.
What I came to witness in these dark days was men of science crazed by their demented dreams of creating something no other mortal has done. It wasn't the first time murder and madness was born in scientific experiments. And like the question of the chicken and the egg, I wonder—is it the science that drives men mad? Or do the scientists taint their formulas with a bit of their own insanity?
Was Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein insane to have brought the dead back to life with powerful jolts of electricity—or did the monster he created drive him mad when it became murderously uncontrollable?
Victor Frankenstein warns another ambitious man of the dangers of trying to achieve what no one else has ever accomplished, calling his success a serpent that has stung him: "Do you share my madness? Have you drunk also of the intoxicating draught? Hear me; let me reveal my tale, and you will dash the cup from your lips!"
I have no doubt Victor Frankenstein would say that Mr. Stevenson's ambitious Dr. Jekyll actually was the murderous beast rather than the alter ego he created with a potion, the violent Mr. Hyde.
Be what it may, the matter that was to draw me into the dark side of science in the tors and crags of the moors began, appropriately enough, in a place of the dead.



Copyright © 2012 by Carol McCleary