Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
Critics may not have loved Frankenstein at first, but the public sure did: the first theater production took place in 1823. (source)
The same ghost story contest that produced Frankenstein also produced The Vampyre, one of the first romantic vampire stories in English—which means that you can blame (or thank, we don't judge) Mount Tambora for Twilight. (source)
The "spark of being" that brings the monster to life is probably electricity, and it was almost certainly inspired by some gruesome experiments by Luigi Galvani, who made frog corpses move by shocking them. "Galvanism" was one of the scientific crazes of the early nineteenth-century. (source)