|
| Richard Rothwell, portrait of Mary Shelley, 1840. National Portrait Gallery, London. |
Nights later, after listening to Byron and Percy Shelley debate the scientific possibility of reanimating dead tissue with electricity, Mary had a waking nightmare. She described it later, in her own words, added to the 1831 edition:
|
“I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.”
Mary Shelley, 1831 introduction to Frankenstein
|
She started writing the next morning. Here is the title page of the finished result.
|
| Title page, first edition, 1818. |
Look closely and you’ll notice no author’s name at all. The novel was published anonymously in 1818, since a Gothic horror novel by an eighteen-year-old woman, written inside a circle of radical thinkers, wasn’t considered a plausible serious work at the time. Mary Shelley’s name didn’t appear on the title page until the second edition, in 1823.
In her own novel, Frankenstein is not the monster. He is Victor Frankenstein, the obsessive young scientist who assembles and animates the creature, then immediately flees in horror from what he’s made. The creature itself is never given a proper name at all, referred to throughout only as “the creature,” “the daemon,” or “the wretch.”
I used to assume this mix-up was some recent, sloppy pop-culture drift. It actually goes back at least to the 1820s stage adaptations, which started billing “Frankenstein” as the monster’s own name almost immediately, and the mistake simply never got corrected.
The full subtitle, “The Modern Prometheus,” points to the actual argument buried inside the horror. In Greek myth, Prometheus stole fire from the gods to give humanity power it wasn’t meant to have. Victor Frankenstein steals the power to create life itself, and the novel spends its whole length working out the cost.
A bad summer vacation, a ghost story contest nobody remembers Byron or Shelley actually finishing… and the one entry that gave the entire century its favorite nightmare.
|
