George Foster and the Frankenstein connection.
By John Grainger

George Foster (or Forster) was found guilty of murdering his wife and child by drowning them in Paddington Canal, London. He was hanged at Newgate on 18 January 1803, shortly after which his body was taken to a nearby house where it was used in an experiment by Italian scientist Giovanni Aldini, nephew of Luigi Galvani who gave his name to Galvanism.

At his trial Foster's mother in law recounted that her daughter and grandchild had left her house to see Foster at 4pm on Saturday, 4 December 1802. Joseph Bradfield, in whose house Foster lodged, reported that they had stayed together that night and gone out at 10am on the Sunday morning. He also stated that Foster and his wife had not been on good terms because she wished to live with him. Various witnesses saw Foster with his wife and child in public houses near Paddington Canal during the day on the Sunday. The body of his child was found on the Monday morning and, after the canal was dragged for three days, his wife's body was also found.

Foster claimed that upon leaving The Mitre he set out alone for Barnet in order to see his other two children who were in the workhouse there, though he was forced to turn back at Whetstone due to the failing light. This was contradicted by a waiter at The Mitre who said the three left the inn together. Skepticism was also expressed that he could have walked to Whetstone in the time he claimed. The jury found him guilty. He was sentenced to death and also to be dissected thereafter. This sentence was designed not only to provide medicine with corpses on which to experiment, but also to ensure that the condemned could not rise at Judgement Day, their bodies having been cut into pieces and selectively discarded. Foster was hanged on 18 January, shortly before which he made a full confession. He said he had come to hate his wife and had twice before taken his wife to the canal but his nerve had both times failed him.

Foster had attempted suicide by stabbing himself with a kitchen knife, apparently to avoid awakening during the dissection of his body, just in case hanging did not render him dead, a real possibility at that time. Friends of George Foster’s wife also claimed that she was extremely suicidal and had often spoken about killing herself and her daughter. His ‘confession’ was also in some doubt. One of Aldini’s assistants, it was alleged, fast-tracked the whole trial so he could ensure his employer could have the freshest possible corpse. The fairness of the trial was in some doubt.

After the execution Foster's body was given to Giovanni Aldini for experimentation. The experiment he performed on Foster's body was a demonstration of Galvanism. The Newgate Calendar (a record of executions at Newgate) reports that, ‘On the first application of the process to the face, the jaws of the deceased criminal began to quiver and the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted and one eye was actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process the right hand was raised and clenched and the legs and thighs were set in motion.’

Several of those present believed that Foster was being brought back to life (The Newgate Calendar reports that even if this had been so, he would have been re-executed since his sentence was to ‘hang until he be dead) and one man, Mr. Pass, the beadle of the Surgeons' Company and the man who fast-tracked the trial, was so shocked that he died shortly after leaving. The hanged man was certainly dead, since his blood had been drained and his spinal cord severed after the execution.

Many writers and historians recently have stated Aldini was an inspiration for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein due to his many public experimentations of bio-electric Galvanism. Aldini's most famous public demonstration of the electro-stimulation technique of deceased limbs was that performed on the executed George Foster.

While it is true that Aldini did do these attempts at human reanimation during the same time of Shelley's writings and Foster’s execution was a sensational notice in the public venue, there is no specific reference that Shelley did actually adapt Aldini into her works despite obviously being aware of Aldini's experiments which were done in public at the Royal College of Physicians in 1803.

In 1791, Luigi Galvani discovered that the muscles of dead frogs’ legs twitched when struck by a spark. This was one of the first forays into the study of bioelectricity, a field that still today studies the electrical patterns and signals of the nervous system.

Giovanni Aldini was the greatest of all Galvani’s supporters. He helped to organize a society at Bologna to foster the practices of galvanism in opposition to a Volta society established at the University of Pavia.

Aldini travelled all over Europe publicly electrifying human and animal bodies, and his performances were extraordinary theatrical spectacles. In 1802 Giovanni Aldini came to London with a spectacular demonstration. Such spectacles performed on humans (and ox heads) produced repeated, spasmodic movements of facial muscles, arms, and legs. He stimulated the heads and trunks of cows, horses, sheep and dogs. An eyewitness reported: "Aldini, after having cut off the head of a dog, makes the current of a strong battery go through it: the mere contact triggers really terrible convulsions. The jaws open, the teeth chatter, the eyes roll in their sockets; and if reason did not stop the fired imagination, one would almost believe that the animal is suffering and alive again".

Though a showman in many respects, Aldini was among the first to treat mentally ill patients with shocks to the brain, reporting complete electrical cures for a number of mental illnesses. These experiments were described in details in Aldini's book published in London in 1803 "An account of the late improvements in galvanism, with a series of curious and interesting experiments performed before the commissioners of the French National Institute, and repeated lately in the anatomical theatres of London, by John Aldini." It was an influential book on galvanism, that presented for the first time a series of experiments in which the principles of Volta and Galvani were used together. The fine series of plates illustrated the experiments which involved bodies and heads of animals and humans. For the first time a description appears here of the magnetization of steel needles through connection to a voltaic circuit.
Picture here.

Professor Aldini made a series of experiments which showed the power of galvanism beyond any other stimulant in nature. He had the courage to apply it at Bologna to the bodies of various criminals who had suffered death there and he excited the remaining vital forces in an astonishing manner. This stimulus produced the most horrible contortions and grimaces by the motions of the muscles of the head and face; and an hour and a quarter after death, the arm of one of the bodies was elevated eight inches from the table on which it was supported and this even when a considerable weight was placed in the hand.

The most famous experiment took place at the Royal College of Surgeons in London in 1803, on a hanged man named George Foster who was probably misrepresented, maybe taking the rap for his wife’s suicide, frightened that he would strangle on the rope, but who shall go down in history as the murderer who ‘almost’ came back to life and probably inspired one of the most read tales in history.

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