ABSTRACT
The creature is a new species that threatens to supplant the supremacy of man, not out of evil intent, but simply by enacting the natural process described by Erasmus Darwin. The massive form of Frankenstein's creature is evocative of image and Darwin's rampage of destruction is made all the more frightful when he is seen as a personification of the proletariat. While Darwin and most other evolutionary theorists were overtly deistic in the exposition of their ideas, the trauma of the French Revolution led social conservatives to criticise anything related to a worldview in which God was not a constant intervening force. In 1797, the aptly titled Anti-Jacobin was created to guard against anything 'devoted to the cause of sedition and irreligion, to the pay or principles of France'. As the anti-Jacobins saw it, their censure of Darwin was at the same time a condemnation of evolutionary biology and revolutionary ideas of progress and perfectibility.
