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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Frankenstein: The Original 1818 Edition," Mary Shelley delivers a groundbreaking exploration of the human condition, the interplay between creator and creation, and the ethical implications of scientific ambition. Written in a rich, Gothic style that intertwines vivid imagery and philosophical introspection, the novel is acclaimed as one of the earliest works of science fiction. Set against the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution, it encapsulates the anxieties of an era grappling with rapid technological advancements and moral dilemmas, as Victor Frankenstein's pursuit of knowledge results in the birth of a tormented creature that seeks acceptance and understanding. Mary Shelley, often considered the mother of science fiction, began writing "Frankenstein" when she was just eighteen, inspired by her intellectual conversations with peers such as Lord Byron and her father, the political philosopher William Godwin. Experiencing personal loss and societal upheaval, Shelley artfully weaves her own existential reflections and critiques of Romantic ideals into her narrative. The novel not only mirrors her personal struggles but also reflects broader societal fears regarding the potential perils of unrestrained technological progress. "Frankenstein" is a timeless classic that challenges readers to confront their own ethical boundaries in the face of innovation. It remains profoundly relevant today, inviting introspection about the consequences of our creations and the essence of humanity. This edition provides an authentic glimpse into Shelley's original vision, making it an essential read for both scholars and general readers alike. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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FRANKENSTEIN (The Original 1818 Edition)
Table of Contents
Introduction
A lonely creator beholds the life he summoned and recoils from the mirror of his own ambition. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein opens where human desire to know and to surpass meets the cost of responsibility. From its first pages, the novel binds scientific curiosity to moral consequence, asking what it means to create, to nurture, and to be answerable for what we bring into the world. It fuses the chill of Gothic terror with the restless energy of Romantic inquiry, inviting readers to confront the thrilling, terrifying prospect that human ingenuity can trespass into acts once reserved for nature or the divine.
This book is a classic because it helped invent a new kind of story while deepening the possibilities of the old. Frankenstein stands at the crossroads of Gothic fiction and Romantic philosophy, and in doing so it sketches the blueprint of modern science fiction. Its imaginative premise has proved inexhaustible, yet its endurance owes as much to moral sophistication as to invention. The novel’s layered voices, psychological acuity, and elemental conflicts have influenced generations of writers and thinkers. It endures not as a museum piece but as a living text whose questions about power, empathy, and accountability remain challenging and urgent.
Mary Shelley, born in 1797, conceived Frankenstein in 1816 and published it anonymously in 1818 in London as a three-volume novel. Subtitled The Modern Prometheus, it emerges from the early nineteenth century’s ferment of scientific speculation, philosophical debate, and artistic experiment. The 1818 edition is the original version, written by a young author with a daring, unblinking gaze at the human costs of knowledge. The book’s premise is simple yet profound: a brilliant student of natural philosophy discovers a method to animate lifeless matter, then confronts the moral aftermath of that success. Its purpose is to unsettle, provoke reflection, and move.
Frankenstein unfolds through an artful frame of letters and confessions, carrying readers from polar ice to university laboratories and alpine heights. Within this structure, an explorer listens to the history of a driven young scientist and to the voice of the being he brought to life. The plot’s outward events serve an inward drama of choice, consequence, and recognition. Shelley presents the initial setup with deceptive clarity: the secret of life is discovered, a creature is made, and creator and creation face one another. What follows is less a sequence of shocks than a sustained examination of duty, sympathy, and the limits of control.
Shelley’s stated aim, later recalled in her own account of the novel’s genesis, was to craft a tale that would awaken profound dread while engaging the conscience. The seed was planted during the extraordinary summer of 1816 near Lake Geneva, amid a friendly challenge among writers to produce ghost stories and amid conversations about galvanism, vital principle, and the powers claimed by modern science. From this context arose a vision not of elaborate machinery but of a moral experiment: what happens when intellectual triumph is not matched by care. The novel draws readers toward fear and pity, pressing them to imagine ethical responses to ingenuity.
As a cornerstone of modern speculative narrative, Frankenstein has radiated outward through literature and culture. It catalyzed immediate theatrical adaptations and has been retold across languages, genres, and media, often reshaping the story’s imagery while preserving its ethical core. Later writers of scientific romance and science fiction developed its questions about invention and responsibility, while realist and modernist authors absorbed its insights into alienation and identity. The book’s central figures have become cultural touchstones, yet the original novel retains a freshness and intimacy impossible to summarize. Its influence endures because its inquiries are at once elemental and adaptable to new technologies and new fears.
The subtitle The Modern Prometheus signals the novel’s mythic reach. In classical myth, Prometheus steals fire for humanity; Shelley transforms that theft into the gift and burden of animation, recasting the creator as both benefactor and transgressor. The narrative probes parenthood, education, and abandonment, asking what is owed to any being we bring into the world, by birth or by invention. It tests whether monstrosity resides in origin, in action, or in the eyes of society. Alongside these ethical tensions are questions of language and consciousness: how a voice is formed, how stories confer humanity, and how recognition can redeem or destroy.
Form is central to the novel’s power. Shelley builds a set of nested narratives that complicate blame and sympathy, allowing each principal voice to claim the reader’s attention in turn. The landscapes are not mere backdrops but moral weather: frozen seas, storm-swept crags, and shadowed cities echo internal desolation and resolve. The prose moves from measured curiosity to urgent confession, guiding readers through wonder, terror, and moral reckoning. This architecture resists simple answers. By setting competing truths side by side, the book demands that readers weigh responsibility across intention and consequence, and it invites them to inhabit perspectives they might otherwise condemn or dismiss.
Frankenstein belongs to a moment when Europe’s intellectual climate wrestled with the promises and perils of discovery. The early nineteenth century saw rapid advances in chemistry, anatomy, and electrical experimentation, as well as debates about the boundary between mechanism and life. It also witnessed Romanticism’s celebration of nature and the imagination, and a renewed attention to the individual’s inner life. Shelley channels these currents into narrative form, staging a confrontation between Enlightenment confidence and Romantic humility before the sublime. Her novel does not deliver a lecture on science; rather, it dramatizes how knowledge, severed from sympathy and stewardship, can unmake the very purposes it seeks to serve.
Mary Shelley’s authorship is itself part of the book’s significance. The novel appeared anonymously, and its youthful creator had already survived loss and public scrutiny. She was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, inheriting a legacy of intellectual boldness that she made distinctly her own. Writing as a teenager and publishing at twenty, she advanced themes of care, education, and justice that resonate beyond the Gothic mold. That a young woman crafted this foundational work unsettled expectations in her time and still challenges assumptions about who speaks for science, philosophy, and terror. Frankenstein’s authority derives from this audacity and insight.
This edition presents the 1818 text, which differs meaningfully from the later 1831 revision. The original version retains a spare, urgent momentum and a keener sense of contingency, with characters’ choices foregrounded over retrospective fatalism. The later edition adds alterations in language and emphasis, as well as a retrospective account of the book’s origin. Reading the 1818 Frankenstein offers proximity to Shelley’s first design, its intricate balance of dread and sympathy, and its open, searching spirit. It allows contemporary readers to encounter the work before later retellings and revisions accrued around it, and to feel the novel’s questions in their sharpest form.
Frankenstein remains vital because it entwines wonder with warning. It asks what kind of creators we are willing to be, in laboratories, workshops, studios, and homes. It speaks to debates about artificial intelligence, biotechnology, environmental stewardship, and social inclusion, while never reducing itself to a single lesson. The novel endures through its humane insistence that power demands care, that imagination requires accountability, and that voices at the margins must be heard. In the 1818 edition’s clear, haunting pages, readers find not just a tale of terror but a companion for thinking bravely about invention, responsibility, and the fragile bonds that make us human.
Synopsis
Robert Walton writes from the far North to his sister, describing his quest toward the pole and his hunger for discovery and companionship. Ice traps his ship, and the crew sights a distant traveler moving across the frozen waste. Soon they rescue a weakened stranger who seems consumed by a private sorrow. Walton, drawn to him, records the man’s account. The visitor warns of the dangers of unchecked ambition and begins telling the history that brought him there. This frame establishes an austere setting, emphasizes the lure of knowledge, and prepares the reader for a narrative of pursuit, responsibility, and the cost of aspiration.
Born in Geneva to a close, affectionate family, Victor Frankenstein grows up alongside a cherished companion, Elizabeth, and a loyal friend, Henry Clerval. Early reading in outdated natural philosophy sparks his fascination with hidden laws of nature. A dramatic encounter with electricity stirs a desire to penetrate the mysteries of life and death. Sent to the University of Ingolstadt, he meets professors who redirect his studies toward modern science. There, isolation and fervor overtake him. He commits himself to an extraordinary project, working in secrecy, convinced that new power over life will bring glory and benefit, yet increasingly removed from ordinary ties.
Victor’s studies in chemistry and anatomy intensify. He methodically collects materials, calculates processes, and laboriously constructs a being designed to surpass ordinary human limits. When at last he achieves animation, the result terrifies him. Overwhelmed by the contrast between his ideal and the creature’s appearance, he abandons his workshop and succumbs to illness. Henry arrives, nurses him, and briefly restores normality. Yet Victor’s mind remains haunted by his own achievement. Letters from home remind him of familial bonds, but he avoids any mention of his work. He tries to resume studies and social life, while the consequences of his ambition gather.
A message from Geneva reports a family tragedy that draws Victor back to his native city. On the journey, amid storm and darkness, he glimpses a figure whose presence seems to implicate his abandoned creation. Anxious and conflicted, he keeps silent about his suspicions as the community searches for answers. An innocent person faces accusation, and Victor confronts the burden of what he knows and what he fears to reveal. His hesitation deepens his sense of guilt and estrangement. The event marks a turning point, tying his private attempt to master nature to public suffering and irreversible moral uncertainty.
Tormented, Victor seeks relief in the Alpine heights, where the creature approaches and calmly asks to be heard. The narrative shifts to the being’s account. He recounts awakening in confusion, discovering sensation and survival, and learning language and social customs by observing a secluded family. Through stories and books, he forms ideas about virtue, justice, and human history, while recognizing his difference. Attempts at kindness end in rejection. The creature interprets repeated blows of prejudice as a verdict on his existence. He insists that misery, not malice, has shaped him and that his creator’s abandonment set the course of events.
The creature proposes a remedy: if granted a companion like himself, he will withdraw from human society and cease seeking contact with people. He frames this as a claim of fairness and responsibility, appealing to Victor as maker and parent. Victor wrestles with competing duties—to family, to humanity, and to the being he animated. He worries about consequences that might extend beyond his control, yet he also feels the weight of promises made and debts incurred. A guarded agreement emerges, and Victor resolves to travel to gather knowledge and resources, postponing other obligations while he considers the act he contemplates.
Victor departs with Henry for further study and to secure materials discreetly. Their route passes through admired cities and stark coastlines, but Victor gradually isolates himself, choosing a remote place to confront his decision. In solitude he begins work, imagining either peace through compliance or disaster through proliferation. At a decisive moment he chooses a course that ends the second project and ignites the creature’s fury. A bitter threat is delivered that fixes the terms of their conflict. From that point, Victor anticipates peril even in moments of celebration, while the creature watches for opportunities to enforce his demand for recompense.
Events escalate into a series of reprisals that strike those nearest to Victor. Legal complications, illness, and grief follow, while he oscillates between remorse and resolve. The social world narrows to a contest between creator and creation, each claiming justice amid mounting loss. Victor’s father urges a return to ordinary life, and a long-planned union is arranged, yet fear shadows every hope. After new calamity, Victor commits fully to pursuit. The chase crosses mountains, rivers, and seas, driven by messages and traces left ahead of him, until it leads him toward the polar wastes where Walton’s ship lies imprisoned by ice.
Walton resumes the frame, recording the exhausted traveler’s reflections on pride, friendship, and the boundaries of inquiry. The frozen setting tests his crew’s endurance and forces decisions about risk and retreat. The visitor warns against ambition detached from responsibility, while holding fast to his own sense of purpose. A final encounter with the creature offers perspective on intention, suffering, and the search for belonging, without undoing the harm recounted. The narrative closes on the open expanse of ice and sea, leaving the consequences of creation and the duties of knowledge before the reader as enduring, unsettled questions.
Historical Context
Frankenstein unfolds across late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe, mapping a journey from the republican city of Geneva to the German university town of Ingolstadt, the glaciered valleys of the Swiss Alps, the remote Orkney Islands of Scotland, and finally the polar seas of the Arctic. These locales reflect a continent in transition: small civic polities and patrician households coexist with modern universities and expanding scientific laboratories. The routes Victor travels mirror the era’s growing mobility—coaches, riverways, and seaports linking centers of commerce and learning. Nature itself is a historical actor: Alpine glaciers, storm-charged skies, and pack ice frame human ambition within formidable geographies.
The novel’s timeline overlaps with revolutionary upheavals and rapid advances in experimental science. Geneva, with its republican tradition, fell under French annexation in 1798 and rejoined a reconfigured Swiss Confederation in 1815, marking the city with shifting sovereignties. Bavaria’s university reforms and German-speaking Europe’s scientific curricula modernized natural philosophy into chemistry and physiology. Britain and northern Europe wrestled with industrialization, factory regimentation, and new class tensions. Meanwhile, polar exploration and Alpine science attracted travelers seeking knowledge and glory. Mary Shelley situates Victor’s personal quest inside this world of laboratories, lecture halls, and perilous frontiers, where scientific promise collides with volatile politics and unforgiving terrain.
The Enlightenment’s turn to experiment reshaped European knowledge in the eighteenth century. Natural philosophy transitioned from alchemy and scholasticism to quantifiable chemistry and physics under figures such as Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794) in France and, in Britain, the Royal Institution (founded 1799) with Humphry Davy’s public lectures (from 1802) and his Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1812). Laboratories, pneumatic chemistry, and electrical research supplanted occult speculation. In the novel, Victor’s progress from reading Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus to attending modern lectures embodies this shift. Frankenstein dramatizes the Enlightenment’s confidence—and anxiety—about controlled experiment, material causation, and the ethical oversight required by increasingly powerful techniques.
The Industrial Revolution accelerated in Britain from the late 1700s: James Watt’s improved steam engine (patents 1769; partnership with Boulton, 1775) powered mills and mines; mechanized textiles transformed Manchester and Leeds; and locomotion advanced with Richard Trevithick’s 1804 locomotive and George Stephenson’s 1814 designs. The Luddite uprisings (1811–1817) protested labor displacement and harsh factory discipline; dozens were executed in 1813 after trials at York. Frankenstein mirrors these tensions in its creation motif: an artificial being assembled like a machine, brought to “work,” then rejected by its manufacturer. The creature’s demand for recognition and the terror at its strength reflect a society imagining the consequences of industrialized production.
The French Revolution (1789) and the Reign of Terror (1793–1794) upended European orders, followed by Napoleonic wars (1799–1815) that redrew borders and conscripted millions. Geneva was annexed by France in 1798, becoming the département du Léman, then reoriented again after 1813–1815. Mary Shelley was the daughter of political radicals—Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin—whose circles debated the Revolution’s promise and violence. The novel recasts revolutionary hubris as private experiment: Victor’s will to refashion life imitates transformative political ambition, while the ensuing social rupture—murders, exile, and pursuit—echoes the Revolution’s unforeseen consequences. The breakdown of paternal authority and civic stability mirrors post-revolutionary anxieties about unleashed power.
Swiss politics were reconfigured during the Helvetic Republic (1798–1803), a centralized regime imposed under French influence, before partial cantonal autonomy returned. Geneva’s annexation to France in 1798 disrupted its independent republican identity; in 1815 the Congress of Vienna incorporated Geneva into the Swiss Confederation. This background informs the novel’s Geneva, a city of civic pride and patrician families navigating jurisdictional change. References to magistrates, public order, and communal reputation carry the weight of shifting sovereignties and legal frameworks. Frankenstein situates a bourgeois household’s fortunes within a Switzerland negotiating external domination and restored federalism, underscoring how private lives are shaped by political realignment.
Victor studies at the University of Ingolstadt, a Bavarian institution founded in 1472, famous for theology and later for Enlightenment controversies, including the Illuminati founded there by Adam Weishaupt in 1776 (suppressed in 1785). The university was relocated to Landshut in 1800 amid reforms modernizing curricula; German-speaking universities increasingly emphasized chemistry, anatomy, and physics under demonstrative professors. Victor’s timeline suggests the late eighteenth-century period when Ingolstadt still represented a prestigious center. His pedagogical shift—from medieval authorities to contemporary chemistry—reflects the German and Bavarian embrace of laboratory-based instruction. The novel ties scientific temptation to these institutional transformations in higher education and state-driven modernization.
Electrical physiology and galvanism profoundly shaped the novel’s imagination of animation. In the 1780s, Luigi Galvani (Bologna) reported that frog muscles twitched when touched by metals, positing “animal electricity.” Alessandro Volta challenged the theory and in 1800 built the voltaic pile, a continuous source of current that enabled dramatic demonstrations. Giovanni Aldini, Galvani’s nephew, toured Europe applying electricity to animal and human cadavers. On 17 January 1803 in London, Aldini used a voltaic battery on the body of George Foster (or Forster), executed at Newgate for murder; observers at the Royal College of Surgeons reported facial contortions, an opening eye, and limb convulsions, widely covered by the press. Such spectacles linked electricity to life and death in the public mind. In Glasgow in 1818, Andrew Ure applied current to the corpse of executed Matthew Clydesdale, producing violent respiratory and muscular motions; Ure argued that proper stimulation might restore life functions. Concurrently, Humphry Davy’s lectures popularized chemical reactivity, while earlier Erasmus Darwin (Zoonomia, 1794–1796; The Temple of Nature, 1803) speculated about spontaneous generation and organic vitality. Legal and anatomical contexts amplified the allure: Britain’s Murder Act of 1752 allowed dissection of executed criminals, yet cadaver shortages spurred clandestine exhumations by resurrection men from the late eighteenth century onward, especially around London and Edinburgh’s teaching hospitals. Mary Shelley’s 1831 introduction recalls discussions about galvanism and the “principle of life”; in 1816 she and Percy Shelley conversed with Byron and Polidori about scientific possibilities along Lake Geneva. Frankenstein transforms this ferment into plot mechanics: a laboratory assemblage, the harnessing of electricity, and charnel-house procurement dramatize the tantalizing—and morally fraught—frontier where experimental science seemed poised to trespass upon the creation of life itself.
Arctic exploration surged as the British Admiralty renewed efforts to find a Northwest Passage. Prior precedents included Captain Constantine Phipps’s 1773 voyage and whaling-based knowledge compiled by William Scoresby Jr., whose extensive Arctic voyages in the 1810s informed later publications (Account of the Arctic Regions, 1820). In 1818, John Ross led ships Isabella and Alexander into Baffin Bay, inaugurating a decade of British polar enterprises. The novel’s Captain Walton, steering north through ice-choked seas, channels this exploratory zeal, its national prestige, and its hazards: isolation, scurvy, crushed hulls, and uncertain magnetism. Walton’s ambition frames Victor’s tale as a cautionary parallel to imperial-scientific quests.
The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies (VEI-7) injected sulfur aerosols that cooled global temperatures by roughly 0.4–0.7°C. The “Year Without a Summer” (1816) brought incessant rain, frosts in June, and crop failures across Europe; Switzerland suffered acute grain shortages, with famine and typhus in 1816–1817. Mary Shelley spent mid-1816 near Lake Geneva at the Villa Diodati, frequently confined indoors by storms and darkened skies. This climatic anomaly shaped the novel’s atmosphere: black heavens, electric storms, and desolate landscapes heighten the sense of nature’s sublime indifference. Frankenstein’s obsession with controlling life stands starkly against weather that defies prediction and devastates society.
Penal reform debates intensified in Britain during the early 1800s as the “Bloody Code” subjected hundreds of offenses to capital punishment. Sir Samuel Romilly’s Acts (1808–1812) began reducing death penalties for property crimes, while public concern grew over coerced confessions and faulty prosecutions. Continental systems varied: revolutionary France oscillated between draconian measures and codified procedures (Code Napoléon, 1804). The novel’s wrongful execution of Justine Moritz mirrors contemporary anxieties about evidentiary standards, class bias, and the moralism surrounding penitence and confession. Mary Shelley depicts a judicial process that secures order at the cost of truth, exposing how legal institutions could fail vulnerable defendants under pressure of public outrage and clerical influence.
European exile and surveillance regimes proliferated from 1793 through the Napoleonic and Restoration eras. Revolutionary France’s Law of Suspects (1793) and the emigration of more than 100,000 royalists, clergy, and dissidents reshaped communities. Napoleonic police networks monitored movement via passports; the post-1815 order maintained vigilance against conspiracies. In the novel, the De Lacey family’s dispossession and flight for aiding a Turkish merchant evoke these patterns: confiscations, blacklists, and the precarious status of foreigners. Their story illustrates state power over mobility and the xenophobia that shadowed diplomatic realignments. Frankenstein thus embeds private tragedy within a Europe where border crossings and allegiances were charged with political risk.
The Orkney Islands, where Victor attempts to construct a female companion, were sparsely populated fishing and crofting communities shaped by the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century kelp industry. Wartime blockades during the Napoleonic era increased demand for alkali from kelp ash, creating seasonal labor booms that collapsed after 1820. Isolated settlements, Presbyterian moral codes, and local magistrates maintained vigilance over strangers and nocturnal activity. This historical milieu informs the islanders’ suspicion of Victor’s clandestine laboratory work and the ready mobilization of communal policing. The bleak maritime environment, with treacherous tides and limited resources, amplifies the novel’s emphasis on secrecy, scarcity, and the social scrutiny of deviance.
Alpine science matured alongside mountaineering and glaciology. Horace-Bénédict de Saussure organized scientific ascents of Mont Blanc after its first climb in 1786 by Balmat and Paccard, measuring barometric pressure and temperature to study the atmosphere. James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth (1788) advanced deep time and erosion-driven geology, later refined in the Alps. Travelers documented crevasse formation and glacier advance affecting Valais and Savoy communities. Frankenstein’s dramatic scenes at the Mer de Glace near Chamonix reflect this scientific turn from gentle pastoral to dynamic geology. The icefield’s indifferent force contextualizes Victor’s enterprise within an Earth shaped by processes indifferent to human will or morality.
Economic distress and political unrest spiked in Britain during 1816–1817. Harvest failures linked to Tambora worsened unemployment among weavers and laborers; food riots erupted from East Anglia to the Midlands. The Spa Fields meetings in London (November–December 1816) and the Pentrich Rising (June 1817) revealed radical networks and harsh state responses, including arrests and transportation. These crises paralleled anxieties about the destabilizing effects of rapid change. Frankenstein can be read against this background: the creature’s exclusion, violent retaliation, and demand for subsistence echo the era’s fear of a disaffected underclass. The novel registers the period’s alarm at marginal populations turned dangerous through neglect and repression.
Frankenstein functions as a critique of early industrial and scientific modernity’s moral lacunae. Victor’s solitary research, procurement of human remains, and refusal of responsibility upon success dramatize a society that lauds innovation while obscuring its costs to bodies and communities. The novel exposes the ethical vacuum in a culture eager for mastery—of electricity, chemistry, and nature—yet unprepared to regulate experiments that blur life and death. By staging catastrophe within bourgeois domesticity, it indicts a paternalist order that externalizes risk onto dependents and the poor. The work interrogates whether technological prowess, absent social accountability and consent, corrodes the civic foundations it claims to improve.
The narrative also scrutinizes law, class, and power in a restoration-era Europe anxious about disorder. Justine’s execution displays institutional deference to reputation over evidence, while the De Laceys’ exile highlights surveillance, xenophobia, and property insecurity after revolution and empire. The creature’s status as vagrant and outcast exposes how communities police belonging through appearance, speech, and lineage, anticipating debates on pauperism and criminalization. Women’s circumscribed legal standing—visible in Elizabeth, Justine, and Safie—echoes contemporary struggles for civil rights advanced by Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792. The book’s relentless tragedy argues that social injustice, not fate, manufactures monsters by denying recognition, due process, and equitable protection.
Author Biography
Mary Shelley was a British novelist, editor, and travel writer who emerged from the Romantic era and helped shape modern speculative fiction. Best known for Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, she bridged Gothic conventions with contemporary debates about science, ethics, and responsibility. Across a career spanning the early to mid-nineteenth century, she produced historical, political, and domestic novels, short fiction for literary annuals, and influential nonfiction. She also undertook substantial editorial labor that affected the reception of key Romantic writers. Today, her body of work is read as a sustained meditation on creativity, power, sympathy, and the social conditions that govern human flourishing.
Raised in an environment of intense intellectual exchange, Shelley received an unconventional education centered on extensive reading, conversation, and observation rather than formal schooling. Her parents, the philosopher-novelist William Godwin and the writer Mary Wollstonecraft, are widely acknowledged influences whose ideas about reason, rights, and education left enduring traces in her fiction. From an early age she engaged with Enlightenment science, political theory, and European literature, and she traveled on the continent, experiences that broadened her historical and cultural imagination. Her mature work shows familiarity with Milton, the Gothic tradition, and contemporary scientific speculation, filtered through a Romantic sensitivity to feeling, nature, and moral consequence.
In the rainy summer of 1816 near Lake Genevaa season later known for unusual weather disruptionsShelley joined a circle that included Lord Byron and the physician-writer John Polidori, alongside the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. A conversation about recent experiments and ghost stories led to a writing challenge, prompting her to imagine the narrative that became Frankenstein. She began drafting soon afterward, developing a layered narrative structure and a tone that intertwined wonder with anxiety about unchecked inquiry. The project crystallized central Romantic tensions: the allure of discovery, the limits of authority, and the demands of sympathy in a rapidly changing intellectual landscape.
Frankenstein appeared anonymously in the late 1810s, accompanied by a preface written within the household, and quickly provoked strong reactions. Some reviewers condemned its sensational elements; others recognized its imaginative ambition and probing moral questions. Stage adaptations soon multiplied, testifying to its popular appeal. Shelley later revised the novel and added a new authorial introduction in the early 1830s, reflecting on its origins and sharpening its ethical focus for a broader audience. Over time the books reputation expanded from Gothic curiosity to a touchstone of modernity, studied for its meditation on creation, responsibility, social exclusion, and the cultural meanings of science.
Shelley continued to write across genres. Her historical novel Valperga explored power and conscience in medieval Italy, while The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck reexamined national identity through a contested claimant to the English throne. The Last Man offered a speculative, wide-angled vision of catastrophe and community. Later works such as Lodore and Falkner investigated domestic life, education, and moral agency, often foregrounding womens constraints and capacities. She also composed shorter tales for annuals, including The Mortal Immortal, refining Gothic motifs toward psychological inquiry. Throughout, she pursued themes of exile, memory, and social justice, testing how individual character meets the pressure of history.
Beyond fiction, Shelley built a professional profile as editor, biographer, and travel writer. She contributed lives of writers and scientists to a popular cabinet cyclopaedia, bringing clarity and balance to public knowledge of the periods figures. Early in her career she published History of a Six Weeks Tour, and later Rambles in Germany and Italy, combining landscape observation with reflections on culture and politics. She helped prepare and annotate posthumous editions of Percy Bysshe Shelleys poetry and prose, supplying memoirs and notes that decisively shaped his legacy for Victorian readers. Periodical criticism and prefaces further displayed her judicious prose and pragmatic outlook.
In later years Shelley lived mainly in Britain, supporting herself through a mixture of original writing and editorial commissions. Health concerns and financial constraints intermittently complicated her productivity, yet she maintained a steady reputation among publishers and readers. She died in the mid-nineteenth century, by which time Frankenstein had already become a cultural phenomenon through adaptations and discussion. Her legacy has only grown: scholars now foreground her range as a novelist, critic, and intellectual historian. Frankenstein anchors debates about technology and ethics, while the broader oeuvre informs studies of gender, Romanticism, historical fiction, and the responsibilities of imagination in public life.
FRANKENSTEIN (The Original 1818 Edition)
PREFACE
THE event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence. I shall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination; yet, in assuming it as the basis of a work of fancy, I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors. The event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment. It was recommended by the novelty of the situations which it developes; and, however impossible as a physical fact, affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield.
I have thus endeavoured to preserve the truth of the elementary principles of human nature, while I have not scrupled to innovate upon their combinations. The Iliad, the tragic poetry of Greece, Shakespeare, in the Tempest and Midsummer Night’s Dream and most especially Milton, in Paradise Lost, conform to this rule; and the most humble novelist, who seeks to confer or receive amusement from his labours, may, without presumption, apply to prose fiction a licence, or rather a rule, from the adoption of which so many exquisite combinations of human feeling have resulted in the highest specimens of poetry.
The circumstance on which my story rests was suggested in casual conversation. It was commenced partly as a source of amusement, and partly as an expedient for exercising any untried resources of mind. Other motives were mingled with these as the work proceeded. I am by no means indifferent to the manner in which whatever moral tendencies exist in the sentiments or characters it contains shall affect the reader; yet my chief concern in this respect has been limited to the avoiding the enervating effects of the novels of the present day, and to the exhibition of the amiableness of domestic affection, and the excellence of universal virtue. The opinions which naturally spring from the character and situation of the hero are by no means to be conceived as existing always in my own conviction; nor is any inference justly to be drawn from the following pages as prejudicing any philosophical doctrine of whatever kind.
It is a subject also of additional interest to the author that this story was begun in the majestic region where the scene is principally laid, and in society which cannot cease to be regretted. I passed the summer of 1816 in the environs of Geneva. The season was cold and rainy, and in the evenings we crowded around a blazing wood fire, and occasionally amused ourselves with some German stories of ghosts, which happened to fall into our hands. These tales excited in us a playful desire of imitation. Two other friends (a tale from the pen of one of whom would be far more acceptable to the public than anything I can ever hope to produce) and myself agreed to write each a story founded on some supernatural occurrence.
The weather, however, suddenly became serene; and my two friends left me on a journey among the Alps, and lost, in the magnificent scenes which they present, all memory of their ghostly visions. The following tale is the only one which has been completed.
Marlow, September, 1817
VOLUME ONE
LETTER ONE
TO MRS. SAVILLE, ENGLAND.
St. Petersburgh[1], Dec. 11th, 17 – .
You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings. I arrived here yesterday; and my first task is to assure my dear sister of my welfare, and increasing confidence in the success of my undertaking.
