Hidden depths: Halley, hell and other people

During the long eighteenth century, boundaries between theology and natural philosophy, between imaginary and factual travel narratives, between fiction and social commentary, were far more fluid than they are today. To explore these relationships, this paper links Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—a book often hailed as the first science fiction novel—to two earlier works which are now less well known: Edmond Halley’s article about terrestrial magnetism, in which he suggested that God had created inhabited illuminated cavities inside the earth; and a satirical fantasy voyage written by the Danish author Ludvig Holberg, but published anonymously as Niels Klim’s journey to the underground and immediately translated into many languages. Attention is focussed on how the ambiguous presentation of these and other texts blurs any straightforward classification of genres. The aim of examining these writers together is not to search for direct mappings from one project to another, but instead to introduce Holberg’s unfamiliar yet important book and also to cast new light on Frankenstein, one of England’s most famous works of literature.