Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is hailed as the beginning of a new genre. Stemming from the Romantic gothic literature of her time, she created something new and different: science fiction.
But does the world need yet another Frankenstein reprint? What’s different about this version?
Artwork and merging editions
One of the (many!) fascinating pursuits in republications is in looking for things that haven’t been done before. As we began looking through the various editions since the first anonymous publication of 1818, the choice of artwork was most interesting. The 1897 Gibbings edition includes plates of various locations in Europe, which are lovely and set the scene well. But when we saw the 1922 printing done by Cornhill Publishing, we realized the illustrations done by Carl Lagerquist fit nicely.
We spoke with staff at three different academic libraries about obtaining new scans or photos of these plates, as there are only seven listed copies of this edition worldwide. (Oddly, one library agreed to re-scan the illustrations–but their Cornhill 1922 edition had no illustrations! Very strange, these old books.) Eventually, the Olive Kettering Library staff at Antioch College was able to help us out.
And then there was the matter of Mary Shelley telling her story. When Frankenstein was acknowledged as Mary Shelley’s work and not as the mysterious “Marlow” from the 1818 preface, publishers Colburn and Bentley asked her to write an introduction for an 1831 reprint … and she also revised the text before that printing. The Gibbings edition includes this introduction, while the Cornhill does not. Therefore, compiling Lagerquist’s artwork with Shelley’s introduction was (ta-da!) a completely new version of this work.
While your library may not need another edition of Dr. Frankenstein and the conversations with his monster, if you choose to purchase this for someone in your life, you can rest assured this offering is unique. (We highly recommend the “pocket hardcover,” hint hint! Who can resist a classic in a super-portable, super-giftable form?)
Notes about the book | Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: a woman who thinks
As the child of a journalist and feminist philosopher, Mary Shelley was taught that women were worth educating and that her mind was made for thinking. Though her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died not long after she was born, Mary studied her mother’s writings as she grew, which had a great impact on her own literary work.
Science gone too far?
When her friend Lord Byron issued a challenge to create an original ghost story, Mary struggled to conceive of a premise. It was days before the idea came to her, by then-eighteen-year-old Mary learned of Luigi Galvini’s experimentation with the use of electricity on dead animals. She also discovered his nephew’s reanimation of the body of an executed murderer. The inevitability of science going too far no longer seemed a leap of the imagination.
The often-depressed Mary could be likened to the obsessed Victor Frankenstein, the doctor she created for her story. While Victor pieced together a new creation from several corpses, she stitched together the fearful news from the scientific front, envisioning a world when the creation makes a monster of its creator. How did being a mother, and a mother who was grieving the death of her daughter at this point, impact Frankenstein? The reader must decide for themselves.
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