Frankenstein

Frankenstein was conceived in the wet summer of 1816 on the shore of Lake Geneva, where Mary Godwin, not yet nineteen, was staying with Percy Shelley, Byron and Byron’s physician John Polidori. Byron proposed that each of them write a ghost story. Mary’s, she said later, came to her after nights of talk about galvanism and the principle of life: the image of “the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together”. She wrote it over the following year, married Shelley in December 1816, and published the novel anonymously in three small volumes on 1 January 1818, with a preface by Shelley and a dedication to her father, William Godwin. Her name first appeared on the second edition, in 1823. In 1831 she revised the book substantially for Bentley’s Standard Novels series, adding the introduction that tells the story of the Geneva summer and softening some of the first edition’s harder edges. The text in this edition, as in the Project Gutenberg transcription it follows, is the 1831 revision.

It is worth saying what the book is not. It is not a story about a monster with bolts in his neck, and the creature is never called Frankenstein; that is his maker’s name. It is a novel in letters and nested narratives — Walton writing to his sister from the Arctic, Victor Frankenstein telling Walton his story, the creature telling Victor his — and its real subject is responsibility: what is owed by a maker to the thing he makes, and by a society to the stranger it refuses to see. The creature’s own account, at the centre of the book, of learning language by listening at the wall of a cottage, and reading Plutarch, Milton and Goethe, is among the strangest and most moving passages of English Romantic prose.

Mary Shelley was the daughter of two radical writers, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and the book carries their arguments about education and justice into a form nobody had tried. It is also, plainly, a book written by someone who had already lost a child. Read it for its structure, for the Alps and the Orkneys and the ice, and for the last pages, which are not a chase but a conversation.

This edition presents the complete 1831 text, including Shelley’s 1818 preface and Mary Shelley’s 1831 introduction, typeset by Bibliomancer. Nothing has been abridged or modernised.