Especially in the digital age, losing control over one’s creations speaks to the experience of many artists, authors, and musicians.
Stalkers and obsessive collectors are not unique to today’s celebrity culture: Lord Byron was among the first to encounter such impassioned followers.
Was Lord Byron an incestuous, sadistic monster? A trail of letters in NYPL’s Pforzheimer Collection suggests it was so.
Did a guitar in NYPL’s Pforzheimer Collection really belong to Percy Bysshe Shelley?
Satan, as depicted in Milton’s Paradise Lost, shared much in common with Mary Shelley’s Creature, the anti-hero of her famous novel.
In Mary Shelley’s day, scientists hoped to raise the dead using electricity. Now they use it to keep people alive.
Was it a showboating Italian physicist, or a grave-robbing anatomy professor, who inspired Mary Shelley?
Automata, the precursors to robots, were in the zeitgeist around the turn of the 19th century.