Who was a model for Mary Shelley’s protagonist? Candidates include a 17th-century alchemist and Charles Darwin’s grandfather.

Darwin referred to this process as "natural selection", though even that was not entirely novel. His grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, among others. Long before his grandson, the noted polymath and ...

His grandfathers had both been important figures of the Enlightenment: Josiah Wedgewood, industrialist and anti-slavery campaigner, and Erasmus Darwin, a doctor whose book ‘Zoonomia’ had set ...