Frankenstein--The 1818 Text

by Mary Shelley

  March/April 1816: MWS’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont, begins her relationship with Lord Byron.

  May 2, 1816: MWS, PBS, William (their son), and Claire Clairmont (pregnant with Byron’s child) depart London for their journey to Switzerland to meet with Byron.

  May 13, 1816: MWS, PBS, and their party arrive at Lake Geneva.

  May 27, 1816: PBS and Byron meet for the first time (MWS having met Byron in London a month before).

  June 15–18, 1816: Byron and PBS and possibly Byron’s doctor, John William Polidori, discuss the “principle of life”; the ghost-story competition begins at the Villa Diodati; and MWS is apparently the last to conceive a tale, which she begins with the words, “It was on a dreary night of November” (which became the first sentence of volume 1, chapter 5 of the novel).

  June 22–30, 1816: MWS apparently writes her story while PBS and Byron take their boat tour around Lake Geneva.

  July 24, 1816: MWS enters “write my story” into her Geneva journal, her first extant reference to what became Frankenstein.

  July 29–August 25, 1816: MWS continues to write her story.

  August 21, 1816: MWS and PBS “talk about [her] story,” which may not have had the outside frame or the inside Safie narrative at this stage.

  August 29–September 10, 1816: The Shelley party departs Geneva, returns to England, and MWS settles in Bath with the pregnant Claire Clairmont.

  September 16, 1816: By this date, MWS resumes drafting her full novel.

  October 9, 1816: MWS’s half sister, Fanny Imlay Godwin, commits suicide.

  October 18, 1816: By this date, MWS resumes drafting her novel.

  October 26, 1816: PBS entered in MWS’s Bath journal that “Mary writes her book,” the first reference to Frankenstein as a “book,” or novel.

  November 20, 1816: MWS finishes drafting the Justine episode of the novel.

  December 5, 1816: MWS appears to have finished a version of the chapter on Safie’s arrival and language instruction, although Safie was initially called Maimouna and then Amina.

  December 15, 1816: MWS and PBS receive the news that PBS’s first wife, Harriet Westbrook Shelley, had committed suicide by drowning herself in the Serpentine in London.

  December 30, 1816: MWS and PBS are married in London.

  January 3, 1817: MWS resumes drafting her novel, by which time she is a month pregnant.

  January 12, 1817: Claire Clairmont gives birth to Lord Byron’s child Allegra.

  February 23–April 9, 1817: MWS continues to draft her novel.

  March 18, 1817: The Shelleys move into Albion House in Marlow.

  March 27, 1817: PBS is denied the custody of his and Harriet’s children (Ianthe and Charles) by order of the Chancery Court.

  April 10–17, 1817: MWS “corrects” the draft of her novel.

  April 18–May 10 and 13, 1817: MWS transcribes and restructures her draft (in two volumes) into a fair copy (in three volumes) to be submitted for anonymous publication. PBS will submit the manuscript as the work of his “friend.”

  May 26, 1817: By this date PBS submits the fair copy to the London publisher John Murray, who “likes” but does not accept the novel for publication.

  August 3, 1817: PBS asks his publisher, Charles Ollier, to publish Frankenstein, but Ollier declines the offer within three days.

  August 18–24, 1817: The publisher Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, and Jones agrees to publish Frankenstein.

  September 2, 1817: MWS and PBS’s daughter, Clara Everina Shelley, is born.

  September 24, 1817: MWS gives PBS “carte blanche” to read at least one set of proofs of the novel, which have started to arrive by this time.

  Middle/late October 1817: The British Critic announces as “in the press” a “Work of Imagination, entitled Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, in three volumes.”

  October 20, 1817: MWS visits John Hampden’s monument near Oxford and then revises the Oxford section of the Frankenstein proofs (volume 3, chapter 2) accordingly. For details on these changes, see next entry and see Robinson, Frankenstein Notebooks, xc–xci and 459–61.

  October 28, 1817: PBS writing from Marlow to “Messrs. Lackington & Co.” reveals that changes were made in the Oxford section as well as in the earlier Holland section (volume 3, chapter 1) of the Frankenstein proofs. For details on these changes, see Robinson, Frankenstein Notebooks, xc–xci and 449–51.

  November 6, 1817: The official publication date of the Shelleys’ History of a Six Weeks’ Tour. Members of the Shelley circle publish a number of other major books around this time, including William Godwin’s Mandeville (December 1817), PBS’s Laon and Cythna (December 1817, withdrawn and republished as The Revolt of Islam in January 1818), Thomas Love Peacock’s Rhododaphne (February 1818), and Leigh Hunt’s Foliage (February 1818).

  November 24, 1817: MWS’s father, William Godwin, finishes his reading of a proof copy of Frankenstein.

  December 1, 1817: The Literary Panorama, and National Register announces that “A work of imagination, entitled Frankenstein, or the modern Prometheus, in 3 vols. will be published towards the close of the present month.”

  January 1, 1818: Frankenstein is published anonymously in three volumes by Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, and Jones and is priced at 16s. 6d. (approximately $4.13 in U.S. dollars in 1818, when the pound equaled about $5.00), yielding (after expenses) a net profit of £125 1s. 6d., one-third of which (£41. 13s. 10d.) was due to the author.

  January 2, 1818: PBS sends a copy of Frankenstein to Walter Scott, who reviews the novel in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. See March 20/April 1, 1818, below.

  March 1818: La Belle Assemblée, or Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine prints a mainly positive review of Frankenstein.

  March 1818: The Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany; A New Series of “The Scots Magazine” prints a mixed review of Frankenstein.

  March 12, 1818: MWS, PBS, Claire Clairmont, three children (MWS’s William and Clara together with Claire’s Allegra), and two servants (the nurse Elise Duvillard and the maid Milly Shields) sail from Dover to Calais on their way to Italy.

  March 20/April 1, 1818: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine prints Walter Scott’s positive review of Frankenstein, suggesting it was written by PBS.

  April 1818: The British Critic prints a mainly negative review of Frankenstein, hinting that it was written by Mary Shelley.

  April 1818: The Gentleman’s Magazine prints a positive review of Frankenstein.

  April 1818: The Monthly Review prints a negative review of Frankenstein.

  June 1, 1818: The Literary Panorama, and National Register prints a mainly negative review of Frankenstein, also hinting that it was written by Mary Shelley.

  June 7, 1818: Leigh Hunt’s Examiner announces a forthcoming review of Frankenstein that never appeared.

  June 12, 1818: Quarterly Review prints John Wilson Croker’s negative review of Frankenstein.

  August 15 and 26, 1818: The Morning Chronicle publishes advertisements for Frankenstein, thereby indicating that Lackington and/or individual booksellers still had unsold copies of the novel.

  September 1818: The review of Frankenstein from the April British Critic is reprinted in the Philadelphia Port-Folio.

  September 24, 1818: MWS and PBS’s daughter, Clara Shelley dies in Venice.

  April 1, 1819: John William Polidori’s Geneva vampire story is published as “The Vampyre: A Tale by Lord Byron” in New Monthly Magazine and prefaced by an “Extract of a Letter from Geneva, with Anecdotes of Lord Byron, &c.”

  June 7, 1819: MWS and PBS’s son, William Shelley, dies in Rome.

  June 28, 1819: Byron’s Geneva vampire story (dated 17 June, 1816) is published as “A Fragment” at the end of Mazeppa, A Poem.

  November 12, 1819: MWS and PBS’s son Percy Florence S
helley is born in Florence.

  July 21, 1821: First translation: Frankenstein, ou le Prométhée moderne is translated from the English by Jules Saladin and published in Paris by Corréard in three volumes.

  July 8, 1822: PBS drowns after his boat sinks in the Gulf of La Spezia.

  Mid-[July?] 1823: By this date, MWS presents her personal and corrected copy of Frankenstein to a Mrs. Thomas in Genoa; the copy is now preserved at the Morgan Library in New York City.

  July 28, 1823: Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein opens at the English Opera House (Lyceum Theatre) in London for a run of thirty-seven performances. For this and other theatrical productions, see Steven Forry’s Hideous Progenies (see “Suggested Further Reading”).

  August 11, 1823: The second edition of Frankenstein (with the name of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley on the title page) is published in two volumes by G. and W. B. Whittaker in 500 copies and priced at 14s. There are at least 123 variants in this edition of the novel, probably introduced by William Godwin, who oversees its production because Mary Shelley has not yet returned from Italy.

  August 18, 1823: Henry M. Milner’s Frankenstein; or, The Demon of Switzerland opens at the Royal Coburg Theatre in London for a run of eight performances.

  August 25, 1823: MWS returns to England after having lived in Italy for five years.

  August 29, 1823: MWS attends the Lyceum to see Peake’s Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein, finds herself famous, and is delighted that the playbill represents the nameless Monster as “———.”

  September 1, 1823: Humgumption; or Dr. Frankenstein and the Hobgoblin of Hoxton opens at the New Surrey Theatre for a run of six performances; Presumption and the Blue Demon opens at Davis’s Royal Amphitheatre for a run of two performances.

  September 11, 1823: The London Literary Gazette reports that the English Opera House’s “Frankenstein continues . . . to scare the children.”

  October 20, 1823: Richard Brinsley Peake’s Another Piece of Presumption opens at the Adelphi Theatre for a run of nine performances.

  July 31, 1824: Knight’s Quarterly Magazine prints a mainly positive review of Frankenstein.

  December 13, 1824: Frank-in-Steam; or, The Modern Promise to Pay opens at the Olympic Theatre for a run of four performances.

  June 10, 1826: Jean Toussaint Merle and Antoine Nicolas Béraud’s Le Monstre et le magicien opens at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin in Paris for a run of ninety-four performances.

  July 3, 1826: Henry M. Milner’s The Man and the Monster; or, The Fate of Frankenstein opens at the Royal Coburg Theatre for a run of eight performances.

  October 9, 1826: John Kerr’s The Monster and the Magician; or, The Fate of Frankenstein opens at the New Royal West London Theatre for a run of approximately four performances.

  October 31, 1831: The third edition of Frankenstein, “revised, corrected, and illustrated,” with an engraved title page and frontispiece and a new introduction, is published in one volume, as part of the Standard Novels Series, by Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley in 4,020 stereotyped copies priced at 6s. (MWS having sold her copyright for the new edition for £30.) This stereotyped 1831 edition was reprinted with new title pages in 1832, 1839, and 1849. For a partial collation of the 1818 and 1831 texts, see Appendix I.

  November 7, 1831: The Morning Chronicle reports that “The demand for the ninth Number of The Standard Novels (containing Frankenstein and the first part of The Ghost Seer), having been so great as to absorb on the first day the whole supply, we are requested to inform those who were disappointed in their applications for that volume, that another impression has been produced, and copies may be had either at the publishers, or at the retail booksellers.”

  November 19, 1831: The London Literary Gazette prints a positive review of the new 1831 edition of Frankenstein.

  November 10, 1832: PBS’s 1817/1818 review of Frankenstein is finally published in the Athenæum.

  Suggested Further Reading

  The titles listed below supplement and bring up to date Maurice Hindle’s “Further Reading” in the original Penguin Classics edition. Many of these titles concern Frankenstein in popular culture, especially on stage and screen. The most recent titles demonstrate that Mary Shelley and Frankenstein are very much alive in the twenty-first century.

  Adams, Carol, Douglas Buchanan, and Kelly Gesch, The Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Frankenstein (New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc., 2007).

  Behrendt, Stephen C. (ed.), Approaches to Teaching Shelley’s Frankenstein (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1990).

  Field, Barbara, Playing with Fire (after Frankenstein) (New York: Dramatists Play Service Inc., 1989). Written for and originally produced by the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.

  Forry, Steven Earl, Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations of Frankenstein from Mary Shelley to the Present (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990).

  Garrett, Martin, Mary Shelley, British Library Writers’ Lives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

  Glut, Donald F., The Frankenstein Catalog: Being a Comprehensive Listing of Novels, Translations, Adaptations, Stories, Critical Works, Popular Articles, Series, Fumetti, Verse, Stage Plays, Films, Cartoons, Puppetry, Radio & Television Programs, Comics, Satire & Humor, Spoken & Musical Recordings, Tapes, and Sheet Music Featuring Frankenstein’s Monster and/or Descended from Mary Shelley’s Novel (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1984).

  Goulding, Christopher, “The real Doctor Frankenstein?” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 95:5 (May 2002): 257–59.

  Hitchcock, Susan Tyler, Frankenstein: A Cultural History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007).

  Hoobler, Dorothy and Thomas, The Monsters: Mary Shelley & the Curse of Frankenstein (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2006).

  Jones, Stephen, The Frankenstein Scrapbook: The Complete Movie Guide to the World’s Most Famous Monster (New York: Citadel Press, 1995).

  Louise, Dorothy, Frankenstein: In a New Adaptation, Plays for Performance (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004).

  Lyles, W. H., Mary Shelley: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1975).

  Macdonald, D. L., Poor Polidori: A Critical Biography of the Author of “The Vampyre” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991).

  Morton, Timothy (ed.), A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (London: Routledge, 2002).

  Picart, Caroline Joan (“Kay”) S., The Cinematic Rebirths of Frankenstein: Universal, Hammer, and Beyond (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002).

  ———, Remaking the Frankenstein Myth on Film: Between Laughter and Horror (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003).

  Picart, Caroline Joan (“Kay”) S., Frank Smoot, and Jayne Blodgett, The Frankenstein Film Sourcebook, with a foreword by Noël Carroll, Bibliographies and Indexes in Popular Culture, No. 8 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001).

  Polidori, John William, The Vampyre: A Tale, and Ernestus Berchtold; or, The Modern Oedipus, eds. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Editions, 2008).

  Robinson, Charles E. (ed.), Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus: The Original Two-Volume Novel of 1816–1817 from the Bodleian Library Manuscripts, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (with Percy Bysshe Shelley) (Oxford: Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 2008).

  Robinson, Charles E., “Texts in Search of an Editor: Reflections on The Frankenstein Notebooks and on Editorial Authority,” in Alexander Pettit (ed.), Textual Studies and the Common Reader: Essays on Editing Novels and Novelists (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000), 91–110. Reprinted in Erick Kelemen (ed.), Textual Editing and Criticism: An Introduction (New York: Norton, 2008), 363–83.

  St. Clair, William, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni
versity Press, 2004).

  Schoene-Harwood, Berthold (ed.), Mary Shelley: Frankenstein, Columbia Critical Guides (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

  Schor, Esther (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

  Smith, Johanna M., Mary Shelley, Twayne’s English Author Series (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996).

  Stocking, Marion Kingston (ed.), The Clairmont Correspondence: Letters of Claire Clairmont, Charles Clairmont, and Fanny Imlay Godwin, 2 vols. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

  Stocking, Marion Kingston (ed.), with the assistance of David Mackenzie Stocking, The Journals of Claire Clairmont (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968).

  Wolfson, Susan and Ronald L. Levao (eds.), The Annotated Frankenstein (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).

  Introduction to Frankenstein, Third Edition (1831)

  The Publishers of the Standard Novels, in selecting “Frankenstein” for one of their series, expressed a wish that I should furnish them with some account of the origin of the story. I am the more willing to comply, because I shall thus give a general answer to the question, so very frequently asked me—“How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?” It is true that I am very averse to bringing myself forward in print; but as my account will only appear as an appendage to a former production, and as it will be confined to such topics as have connection with my authorship alone, I can scarcely accuse myself of a personal intrusion.

  It is not singular that, as the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity, I should very early in life have thought of writing. As a child I scribbled; and my favourite pastime, during the hours given me for recreation, was to “write stories.” Still I had a dearer pleasure than this, which was the formation of castles in the air—the indulging in waking dreams—the following up trains of thought, which had for their subject the formation of a succession of imaginary incidents. My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings. In the latter I was a close imitator—rather doing as others had done, than putting down the suggestions of my own mind. What I wrote was intended at least for one other eye—my childhood’s companion and friend; but my dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed—my dearest pleasure when free.