Roger Dodsworth was the focus of a widespread hoax in 1826, in which he was claimed to be a man who had fallen into a coma in the Alps in the late seventeenth century and thawed out to return to life in 1826. It is now best known for the short story of the same name by Mary Shelley, published posthumously in 1863, drawn from the story. A French newspaper story, published on 28 June 1826, reported "a most extraordinary event"; a man, around thirty years old, had been discovered buried under a pile of ice in the Alps. On pulling the body out and bathing it in warm water, the man woke up, and declared himself to be Roger Dodsworth, son of the antiquarian Roger Dodsworth, born in 1629 and buried under an avalanche in 1660. The story appeared in translation in a London paper a week later, and from there was widely picked up by the British press.