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Few creatures of horror have seized readers' imaginations and held them for so long as the anguished monster of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The story of Victor Frankenstein's terrible creation and the havoc it caused has enthralled generations of readers and inspired countless writers of horror and suspense.

During the bleak summer months of 1816, when dark rain clouds and volcanic ash swept over Europe, being confined indoors to pass the time, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and her companions challenged each other to a writing competition. From this occasion came a narrative that would shape literary history.

Frankenstein (1818) introduced not one but two enduring archetypes: the scientist obsessed by experimental research and unable to see its ethical and social consequences, and the near-human he creates. The tale is a warning against the "over-reaching" of modern man and the Industrial Revolution, alluded to in the novel's subtitle, The Modern Prometheus.

In 1849, Melville was given a copy of Frankenstein by Godwin's daughter. He "returned to the United States on 31 January 1850 with likely an advanced knowledge and a greater understanding of the numerous conventions, tropes, themes and motifs of the genre of Gothic fiction."

Frankenstein (1818 edition, recommended):

Frankenstein (1831 edition):

Supplemental:

Extracts:

  • "...since it is well settled, that our brains are somehow the organs of sense; then, I see not why human reason could not be put into a pig, by letting into its cranium the contents of a man's. I have long thought, that men, pigs, and plants, are but curious physiological experiments; and that science would at last enable philosophers to produce new species of beings, by somehow mixing, and concocting the essential ingredients of various creatures; and so forming new combinations." (Mardi, 1.98)
  • "Oh, my lord! though we galvanize corpses into St. Vitus’ dances, we raise not the dead from their graves!" (Mardi, 2.72)
  • "...this...carpenter, was, after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not have a common soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow anomalously did its duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksilver, or a few drops of hartshorn, there is no telling.... And this it was, this same unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him; this it was, that kept him a great part of the time soliloquizing; but only like an unreasoning wheel, which also hummingly soliloquizes..." (Moby-Dick, 107)
  • "Hold; while Prometheus is about it, I’ll order a complete man after a desirable pattern. Imprimis, fifty feet high in his socks; then, chest modelled after the Thames Tunnel; ... no heart at all, brass forehead, and about a quarter of an acre of fine brains; and let me see—shall I order eyes to see outwards? No, but put a sky-light on top of his head to illuminate inwards." (Moby-Dick, 108)

This meetup is part of a series on Muses and Monsters.

Related topics

Classic Books
Fiction
Literature
Philosophy & Ethics
Science Fiction

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