Frankenstein – that most resonant and enduring of early nineteenth-century fictions – was born in the febrile atmosphere of the Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816. Bored by the unseasonably cold, wet weather, the Villa’s residents, Byron, John Polidori, Percy Shelley and the eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin, amused themselves by writing ghost stories. The other female member of the party – the pregnant Claire Clairmont – did not take part. Surrounded by three competitive males to whose conversations on “the nature of the principle of life” she was a “devout but nearly silent listener”, frustrated by her inability to “think of a story” (and perhaps also by her future husband’s determination that she should “obtain literary reputation”), one night Mary had a dreadful “waking dream”.

I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then . . . show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion . . . . I opened mine [eyes] in terror. The idea so possessed my mind, that a thrill of fear ran through me . . . . On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story. I began that day with the words, It was on a dreary night of November, making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream.

Mary’s “transcript” of her “grim terrors” has not survived and it was, indeed, quickly superseded. Urged on by Percy Shelley, she continued to work on her tale through July and August 1816, perhaps, as Charles E. Robinson notes in the introduction to his new edition, finishing a “short or novella-length version”, now also lost or destroyed, by the time she returned to England at the end of August. The decision to expand her “story” into a novel was taken about this time and a first draft was completed by late March or early April 1817. Mary revised and expanded this between April 9 and 17, and between April 18 and May 13 she made a fair copy that included a number of textual and structural alterations. This eventually became the printer’s copy for the first edition. Further changes at both proof and revise stages took place before Frankenstein was finally published by the London firm of Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor and Jones in 1818. The text’s evolution did not stop with its publication, however. A second, “New Edition” appeared in 1823, incorporating 123 verbal alterations made not by Mary, but by either her father William Godwin or an unknown printer, though Mary was responsible for the third “revised [and] corrected” edition of 1831. This incorporated most of the changes introduced into the 1823 text as well as numerous other revisions, including an entirely new chapter and an “Introduction” (reproduced as Appendix C in Robinson’s edition). Mary lived for twenty more years, but the Frankenstein of 1831 represented her final public word on the text.

What Mary described as her “hideous progeny” was to have a richly diverse afterlife. Its appropriation and adaptation began early. Richard Brinsley Peake’s play Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein appeared in 1823, and was rapidly followed by popular burlesques such as Humgumption; or, Dr. Frankenstein and the Hobgoblin of Hoxton. It continues to have an international, cross-generic appeal for writers of political satire, musical comedy, and even children’s fiction (Frankenstein’s Cat, 2001: “You’ve heard of Doctor Frankenstein and his monster? Well the monster wasn’t the doctor’s first experiment – there was another”). Since 1910 there have been more than 400 cinematic adaptations and reimaginings of the Frankenstein story. Fictional appropriations such as Peter Ackroyd’s The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008) testify to continuing fascination with both Shelley’s novel and the events surrounding its genesis. In addition, academic, literary-critical preoccupation with Frankenstein thrives, with new monographs, essays and articles joining an already extensive bibliography every year.

In the nineteenth century, Shelley’s novel was often used by caricaturists to comment on political affairs and on cultural and racial differences. As early as 1832, the Poet Laureate Robert Southey invoked the image of “Frankenstein in his laboratory” to examine a gruesome case of exhumation and mutilation carried out in the interests of historical research. On July 21, 1828, Lord Nugent had exhumed what was reputed to be the body of John Hampden, in order to determine how the English Parliamentarian, who was mortally wounded at the Battle of Chalgrove in 1643, had died. The examination included amputating the corpse’s arms with a penknife. Nugent’s account of the treatment meted out to Hampden’s corpse was so anatomically detailed that Southey used the pages of the Quarterly Review to attack it as repellent – “ghastly enough for persons who were neither accustomed to act as resurrectionists, nor had gone through a course of experiments like Frankenstein in his laboratory when he manufactured his monster”. (Southey’s observations appeared a year after the publication of the final authorized lifetime edition, Colburn and Bentley’s Standard Novels version of 1831, the text that Frankenstein was for long known by.)

As Marilyn Butler so acutely observed, Frankenstein is “famously reinterpretable. It can be a late version of the Faust myth, or an early version of the modern myth of the mad scientist; the id on the rampage, the proletariat running amok, or what happens when a man tries to have a baby without a woman”.

Yet the very familiarity of Frankenstein means that its complex pre- and post-publication textual history is often overlooked, and the actual process of composition of a fiction so centrally concerned with creation ignored. The novel’s textual instability is explored in the impressive introduction to Charles Robinson’s new edition. His honourable aim is not to give us another text of the novel we know – or think we know – but to strip away nearly two centuries of revision and appropriation in order to return to what he describes as the “original” Frankenstein. Or rather, since the “transcript of grim terrors” and the short versions of July and August 1816 do not survive, to reinstate the earliest recoverable version of the novel: the manuscript first draft composed between autumn 1816 and March-April 1817, which is now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Robinson’s volume is the first ever edition of this manuscript (a facsimile, by the same editor, was published in 1996). It is accompanied by a scholarly apparatus: a critical introduction, an account of the manuscript, a table showing the structural differences between the first draft and the 1818 first edition, explanatory notes, and appendices. Robinson pays special attention to the manuscript first draft as a collaborative enterprise – as the work of “Mary (with Percy) Shelley”, the brackets are revealing – and provides two separate, but linked, reading texts. The first reproduces the manuscript draft with Percy Shelley’s additions, corrections and revisions, using italics to make “evident . . . . [his] considerable hand” (the pun is presumably intended) at this stage of the novel’s development. The second, helpfully printed on different paper, gives us what Mary wrote in the draft, including her spelling mistakes. The result is to defamiliarize this most familiar of Romantic period novels, by raising the spectre of authorship and providing material evidence that the answer to the question “Who wrote Frankenstein?” is not as straightforward as it might seem.

Naming – of the author, the creator and the creature – is a real issue in Frankenstein, and the question of who actually wrote what the Belle Assemblée described as a “very bold fiction” is not new. It has vexed critics since the novel’s anonymous publication in 1818. Early reviewers may not have been able to decide who the author was, but they were keen to give him or her a name, just as later writers and adapters were equally anxious to label (or mislabel) the creature, transferring the name “Frankenstein” from creator to his creation. In 1818, Walter Scott, writing in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, attributed the novel to Percy Shelley. The conservative British Critic preferred to assign authorship to an unnamed “female”. While the Literary Panorama and National Register rejected “Mr. Shelley” in favour of the nameless “daughter of a celebrated living novelist”, possibly a coded reference to Mary, to whose father, the novelist and political philosopher William Godwin, the novel was dedicated. Even once Frankenstein was publicly claimed by Mary Shelley (most forcefully in her “Introduction” to the 1831 edition), the name game did not stop. In 1832, the Athenaeum published Thomas Medwin’s “On ‘Frankenstein’ by the late Percy Bysshe Shelley” (the essay is reproduced in Appendix B of Robinson’s edition).

It remains impossible to know – though interesting to speculate – how many of Percy Shelley’s alterations to the manuscript were prompted by discussions with Mary, or indeed how much her words and ideas owed to conversations participated in or overheard between herself, Shelley and other members of their circle. The real merit of Robinson’s edition, however, is to make it possible for scholars to trace for the first time how extensive his involvement actually was. From his careful analysis of the draft manuscript, Robinson estimates that Percy Shelley “contributed at least 4,000 to 5,000 words” to the 72,000-word novel. These revisions and additions take a number of forms. Some replace colloquialisms with more formal, Latinate language: “ghost story” with “tale of superstition”; “go to the university” with “become a student at the university”; “it was safe” with “the danger of infection was past”. Others clarify motivation and set up the events that Frankenstein’s insatiable curiosity will unleash. For example, the following comparison between Frankenstein and his future wife, Elizabeth Lavenza. In the draft, Mary Shelley’s “my [ie, Frankenstein’s] amusements were studying old books of chemistry and natural magic; those of Elizabeth were drawing & music” is expanded and changed by Percy Shelley to: “I delighted in investigating the facts relating to the actual world – she busied herself in following the aerial creations of the poets. The world was to me a secret which I desired to discover – to her it was a vacancy which she sought to people with imaginations of her own”. The revisions amplify the difference between the two characters, and establish the curiosity which Frankenstein will later pursue to fatal effect, a curiosity which leads to Elizabeth’s death at the hands of the creature.

Yet further revisions are evidence of what his widow described years later as Shelley’s ability and willingness “to embody ideas and sentiments” rather than to “invent the machinery of a story”. To give one example, the social position of Justine, the girl from a poor family brought into the Frankenstein household as a twelve-year-old, is described by Mary in the first draft as follows: “she was taught all the duties of servant & was very kindly treated”. Percy Shelley’s alterations to this passage offer instead a political disquisition on the difference between servants in the Swiss Republic and those in unreformed monarchies, such as England:

The republican institutions of our country have produced simpler and happier manners than those which prevail in the great monarchies that surround it. Hence there is less distinction between the classes into which human beings have been divided; and the lower orders, being neither so poor nor so despised, are more refined and moral. A servant at Geneva does not mean the same thing as a servant in France and England – Justine was thus received into our family to learn the duties of a servant, which in our fortunate country does not include a sacrifice of the dignity of a human being.

Mary’s single sentence is here replaced with three lengthy ones. Justine is appropriated to advance Percy Shelley’s own political views, becoming a vehicle by which Shelley can criticize an English political system he despised. She remains a servant, but, Shelley argues (convincingly or not), of a different kind to that found in England and France.

Robinson observes that “Most but not all of Percy Shelley’s changes . . . are for the better”. Yet it is important not to reduce the “original” Frankenstein to a discussion of literary value. To be preoccupied with whether Percy’s additions are “better” than what they replace is to miss larger points about collaboration and authorship, both in the Romantic period and beyond. What emerges from the first draft of Frankenstein is a sense of the collaborative energy that helped to forge the novel. The image, vividly evoked in Robinson’s introduction, of Mary and Percy passing the manuscript draft between them, each responding to the ideas of the other, is a powerful reminder that the popular myth of the Romantic author as an isolated, creative genius is just that – a myth. The Shelleys were part of a complex cultural network, involved in literary collaborations and (as the connections between Frankenstein and early nineteenth-century scientific debates illustrate) responsive to contemporary issues.

Frankenstein – in whatever form we choose to encounter it – is not alone in this. Other works central to British Romanticism, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (also first published anonymously), were brought into being by the creative interactions of their authors both with one another and with the political and intellectual climate of their age. Moreover, the posthumous afterlives of Romantic writers such as Coleridge (edited by his daughter and son-in-law) and Percy Shelley (edited by his widow Mary Shelley) owe much to shared production – to what might be described as collaborations between the living and the dead. The value of Charles Robinson’s edition lies in its confirmation of Mary Shelley’s assertion (in the sole-authored “Introduction” of 1831) that “Every thing must have a beginning” – and that beginnings matter – and in its affirmation of community, cooperation and collaboration as fundamental to literary production.

Charles E. Robinson, editor
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)
448pp. Bodleian Library. £14.99.
978 1 85124 396 9

Lynda Pratt is a Reader in Romanticism at the University of Nottingham and co-general editor of the forthcoming Collected Letters of Robert Southey.

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