Features a New Introduction by Jeanette Winterson
When the scientist Victor Frankenstein attempts to create life in his laboratory, he sets in motion tragic forces beyond his control and faces losing everything he loves. No reader in the grip of Mary Shelley's novel, with its mythic-minded hero and its highly sympathetic monster who reads Goethe and longs to be at peace with himself, can fail to notice how much more excellent the original is than all the countless adaptations, imitations, and homages which have followed in its ample wake. In her first novel, written at the instigation of Lord Byron and published in 1818 (and revised in 1831), the teenaged Shelley managed to produce English Romanticism's finest prose fiction. This edition reproduces her original 1818 text.
Features a New Introduction by Jeanette Winterson
When the scientist Victor Frankenstein attempts to create life in his laboratory, he sets in motion tragic forces beyond his control and faces losing everything he loves. No reader in the grip of Mary Shelley's novel, with its mythic-minded hero and its highly sympathetic monster who reads Goethe and longs to be at peace with himself, can fail to notice how much more excellent the original is than all the countless adaptations, imitations, and homages which have followed in its ample wake. In her first novel, written at the instigation of Lord Byron and published in 1818 (and revised in 1831), the teenaged Shelley managed to produce English Romanticism's finest prose fiction. This edition reproduces her original 1818 text.
Frankenstein: Or The Modern Prometheus
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Frankenstein: Or The Modern Prometheus
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Overview
Features a New Introduction by Jeanette Winterson
When the scientist Victor Frankenstein attempts to create life in his laboratory, he sets in motion tragic forces beyond his control and faces losing everything he loves. No reader in the grip of Mary Shelley's novel, with its mythic-minded hero and its highly sympathetic monster who reads Goethe and longs to be at peace with himself, can fail to notice how much more excellent the original is than all the countless adaptations, imitations, and homages which have followed in its ample wake. In her first novel, written at the instigation of Lord Byron and published in 1818 (and revised in 1831), the teenaged Shelley managed to produce English Romanticism's finest prose fiction. This edition reproduces her original 1818 text.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307743312 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 09/30/2025 |
| Series: | Vintage Classics |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
MARY SHELLEY was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin on August 30, 1797 in London, the daughter of William Godwin, a radical philosopher and novelist, and Mary Wollstonecraft, a renowned feminist and the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. As a teenager, she eloped to France with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1814, although they were not married until 1816, after the suicide of his first wife. She began work on Frankenstein in 1816 in Switzerland, while they were staying with Lord Byron, and it was published in 1818 to immediate acclaim. She died in London in 1851.
About the Introducer: JEANETTE WINTERSON was born in Manchester, England. After graduating from Oxford University she published her first novel at age 25, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, to widespread acclaim and a BAFTA for her BBC TV adaption. She has written ten novels for adults, as well as children’s books, non-fiction, and screenplays. She is Professor of New Writing at the University of Manchester.
Read an Excerpt
from the Introduction to the Vintage Classics Edition (2025)
by Jeanette Winterson
A new generation is reading Frankenstein in a new way.
We are who Mary Shelley imagined we would be, more than two hundred years ago, when this nineteen-year-old woman vaulted across time. She landed here, with us, the first people on the planet to create a new kind of intelligence. An artificial life-form that we hope, or fear, will be faster, stronger, smarter. Not subject to the constraints of time as we are. A different kind of being. A different way of being.
AI.
American mathematician John McCarthy named computing power “artificial intelligence” in 1955. He did so to distinguish between the human mind—what we call natural intelligence—and what he, and his colleagues in the USA and Britain, were working to develop.
The Bible tells us in the Book of Ecclesiastes that there is “nothing new under the sun.” This is no longer true. It hasn’t been true since America dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. From then on, humans have had the power to wipe out all of life on Earth.
Since then, we have expanded the range of our self-destruct options. New under the sun is man-made climate breakdown. But we can trace it back to Mary Shelley’s time, the time of the industrial revolution, which started in the north of England in the late 1700s.
My hometown of Manchester was the world’s first industrial city—exporting its name across the world. There are thirty Manchesters in the USA alone. The industrial revolution was the time when fossil fuels first came out of the ground in planet-changing quantities. Coal powered the movement from an agricultural society to an industrial society. Coal could also produce gas, and later, electricity.
Number three new under the sun is AI. At present, AI is a tool, and humans are tool-using animals. The race in Silicon Valley is to develop AI into much more. A coworker with us. A non-biological life-form.
Victor Frankenstein says, “If I could bestow animation on lifeless matter . . .”
“Smart AI” can be embodied—from a self-driving car to a robot—or nonembodied, as are most cognitive and generative systems. As smart AI develops, it is likely that it could be both—and simultaneously—because AI is not a bounded condition in the way that biological entities are. It doesn’t have to be one thing in one place at one time. Put simply, AI is not made of meat.
Victor Frankenstein must visit the charnel houses and graveyards for his collection of body parts. That’s how he gets going on his new life-form. We are learning how to do it using the zeros and ones of code. Both these new and hybrid forms of life—Victor’s monster, and maybe ours—are powered by electricity.
Mary Shelley was reflecting her own time when she has Victor going about the ghoulish business of collecting body parts. If bodies could not be found aboveground—accidents, sudden death, victims of the death penalty—then grave-robbing would supply cadavers, or bits of them, to the medical schools. Mary Shelley wrote, “The dissecting room and the charnel house furnished many of my materials and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation.”
Once Victor has sewn his hideous assemblage together, it is what it is—lying lifeless on the slab. An ugly, oversize chunk of dead meat. What’s missing?
The answer is a massive jolt of electricity.
When Mary Shelley conceived of her man-made monster and had him galvanized into life by electricity, she was foreseeing a future that was nowhere near at hand. Electricity was poorly understood and not in practical use. It is astonishing that Mary Shelley made this connection. Life in the future would depend on electricity. A new life-form could not be brought into being without it.
To understand the genius of Mary Shelley’s intuition about electricity, we have to go back to her childhood years living with her father, the political philosopher William Godwin (1756–1836).
The tall, thin, house on Skinner Street was close to Newgate Prison. From her upper window, Mary could see those convicted of murder being bundled into carts for their last journey to the gallows. Their bodies were automatically earmarked for medical dissection. It was just a fact of life.
In 1803, when Mary was six years old, a remarkable experiment took place in the prison. Giovanni Aldini, a professor of physics at the University of Bologna, was visiting London. Aldini’s uncle was Luigi Galvani, the man who had made dead frogs leap into the air by applying electrodes, connected to a rudimentary battery, to their skin. His surname gives us both the industrial process of coating metal with zinc using an electric current and the verb: to galvanize, meaning to shock into action.
Galvani’s nephew wanted to do better than frogs, so he arranged for permission to try to re-animate the freshly dead corpse of a hanged man.
Onlookers watched in horror as fingers clenched, then an eye opened. Scientists in the room asked themselves: Was the new discovery of electricity the discovery of the divine spark?
Or, as Victor Frankenstein asks himself, as he prepares to sew together his creature: “Whence . . . did the principle of life proceed?”
It is important for the modern reader to understand that in the early nineteenth century, science and philosophy were not separated in the way that they are now, any more than a rigorous approach to science was separated from a fascination with the supernatural—religious or not. Thinkers were polymaths. Men of science (and they were men) venerated the arts as God-given expressions of beauty.
To be a scientist and a painter or musician was not odd. To be a scientist and to believe in God was normal. Speculative inquiry was wide-ranging and all-encompassing. Specialism was for tradesman.
The British chemist and philosopher-poet Sir Humphry Davy was a frequent visitor to Skinner Street. Davy had learned how to use what was then called a “voltaic pile”—a basic battery—invented by yet another Italian, Alessandro Volta (yes, we call “volts” after him).
Using the stored and stable electrical currents available via a homemade battery gadget, Davy invented the new field of electrochemistry, isolating the elements potassium, calcium, sodium, and magnesium, and speculating, as he did so, on how biological life happens.
This, then, was the environment of Mary Shelley’s childhood. Cutting-edge science, philosophical inquiry, and poetry, too.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge used to wander in, drunk and disheveled, reciting his work. Little Mary hid behind the sofa, listening to his epic ballad The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high,
came floating by,
As green as emerald.
Those hypnotic frozen wastes would come back to haunt Mary Shelley, and her readers, in her novel Frankenstein, as the monster and his creator, Victor Frankenstein, chase each other toward the pitiless end point of the North Pole.
As poetry was held in such high esteem in the Godwin household, it was unsurprising that teenage Mary should fall for the willowy, intelligent Percy Bysshe Shelley. A frequent visitor to Skinner Street, Percy read his poems and Mary swooned. He was twenty-one. She was sixteen. It was love at first sight.
When Mary had finished her household duties, and her father was out or in his study, she left behind the squalor of Skinner Street, never clear of the hot stink of animals waiting to be butchered at nearby Smithfield Market, and ran to leafy St. Pancras churchyard, where her mother was buried. Percy Shelley would wait for her there.
Over the grave of Mary Wollstonecraft, the two young people discovered a shared vision. A vision of equality and democracy that had as its guiding lights the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789. Mary Wollstonecraft had been in Paris during the Revolution, in love with a dashing American called Gilbert Imlay (who turned out to be a cad) and all the while arguing by letter with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose liberty, fraternity, and equality did not extend to women. It was Mary Wollstonecraft who had written and published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792 in response to the American Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1790).
Now, young Mary, who had barely met her mother (Mary Wollstonecraft died in childbirth), believed with her lover, Percy Shelley, that they, too, could work to change society.
Both would do it by writing.
Mary eloped to Italy with Shelley, much to the rage of William Godwin, who had called marriage a monopoly in his writings but didn’t want his daughter to become a practical experiment in breaking one up. Shelley was married already.
In 1816, finally able to marry legally after the suicide of Shelley’s first wife, Mary was (partly) reconciled with her father and the couple returned to London.
Percy Shelley hated England—small-minded, mean-spirited, obsessed with money, as he saw it—but then, he never had to work for a living as his father was wealthy. Shelley didn’t have a lot of spare cash, but he had enough to plan their next trip abroad: a holiday on Lake Geneva.
His great friend, the poet Lord Byron, would come along. Byron would travel with his mistress and his medical doctor. He couldn’t manage without female attention, and he was a terrible hypochondriac. He was also England’s most famous poet. “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” as Lady Caroline Lamb memorably put it. Yet, he was a loyal friend, and he really did like Mary, and liked arguing with her about everything, especially female emancipation, which Percy Shelley supported and Byron did not.
Just before everyone set off, Mary and Percy Shelley went to hear a lecture by a Sir William Lawrence, an eminent medical man (and Shelley’s own doctor) who had come to believe that biological life was nothing more than an electrochemical bath. Life had none of what he called “superadded” value. In other words, no soul, no spirit, nothing waiting to be drawn up to the afterlife.
Man was a kind of machine. A machine made of meat, but a machine nonetheless.
This blasphemous and fascinating theory took its light from the shadow cast by the terrors of the early industrial revolution. For the first time in history, humans were inventing things that seemed to have a life of their own, and with the capacity to run forever. No sleep. No death. No dreams. Machines.
Folktales are stuffed with self-operating appliances that work by magic. Brooms that fly, buckets that fill, pots that boil, axes that chop. Now, self-operating tools had leaped out of fairy tales and onto the factory floor. These merciless machines showed no pity to humans—reduced to a “pair of hands” to “mind” the machine. Humans must keep up with the monstrous pace of these machines or be left behind.
_________
When the young people arrived on Lake Geneva, they did not realize that the earlier volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora, in Indonesia, would do more than change their holiday plans. The stage was set for one of the most famous stories ever written.
The year 1816 would become known as “the year without a summer.” Atmospheric conditions altered by fallout from the biggest eruption in history affected America and Europe. There was snow in the summer. Rain most of the time, and a crepuscular darkness.
Picture it. Damp days. Evenings of candlelight and shadows. Fires that barely kept the wetness out of the rooms. Heavy clothes that did not dry. The lake hid invisible under a cloud of heavy mist. They could not swim, sail, or ride. Indoors, they could read, write, or talk.
Byron hated to be bored. He proposed that they each write a supernatural story. What was most frightening? Something alive? Something dead but alive? It was here that his physician, Dr. John Polidori, came up with an early vampire story. Dr. Polidori was a blood doctor.
For Mary Shelley, a new question emerged. What about something that had no precedent in life? A new life-form. Part man. Part machine. And galvanized by electricity. . . .
Table of Contents
Preface.
Monsters, Visionaries, and Mary Shelley.
Aesthetic Adventures.
Edmund Burke, “On the Sublime and the Beautiful,” from A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful.
Mary Wollstonecraft, from A Vindication of the Rights of Men.
William Gilpin, from Picturesque Travel.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, 1798.
Mary Wollstonecraft, Jemima's Story from Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman.
Mary Godwin (Shelley), journal entries.
Percy Shelley, from Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude.
Mary Shelley, from History of a Six Weeks' Tour.
Percy Shelley, Mont Blanc.
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Canto 3 from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage III.
George Gordon, George Gordon, Lord Byron, A Fragment.
Richard Brinsley Peake, from Frankenstein, A Romantic Drama.
Mary Shelley, from a letter to E. J. Trelawny.
Dr. Benjamin Spock, “Enjoy Your Baby,” from Baby and Child Care.
Milton's Satan and Romantic Imaginations.
The King James Bible, Genesis, Chapters 2 and 3.
John Milton, from Paradise Lost.
William Godwin, from “An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.
George Gordon, Lord Byron, “Prometheus.”
John Keats, To One Who Has Been Long in City Pent.
John Keats, Marginalia to Paradise Lost.
William Hazlitt, “On Shakespeare and Milton,” from Lectures on the English Poets.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Preface Prometheus Unbound.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, from A Defence of Poetry.
Thomas De Quincey, “What Do We Mean by Literature?”
What the Reviews Said.
John Wilson Croker, Quarterly Review, January 1818.
Walter Scott, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, March 1818.
Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany, March 1818.
Belle Assemblàe, March 1818.
The British Critic, April 1818.
Gentleman's Magazine, April 1818.
Monthly Review, April 1818.
The Literary Panorama and National Register, June 1818.
Knight's Quarterly Magazine, August 1824.
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, March 1823.
London Morning Post, July 1823.
George Canning, remarks in the House of Commons, March 1824.
Knight's Quarterly Magazine, August 1824.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Anthenfum, November 1832.
Further Reading and Viewing.
What People are Saying About This
Out of that vampire-laden fug of gruesomeness known as the English Gothic Romance, only the forbidding acrid name of Frankenstein remains in general usage... Mary Shelley had courage, she was inspired. Frankenstein has entertained, delighted and harrowed generations of readers to this day.
Reading Group Guide
INTRODUCTION
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein begat another monster—the frequently cartooned, green-skinned Frankenstein of popular culture who roams the streets on Halloween in the company of mummies and skeletons. In the novel, the monster is nameless, and Victor Frankenstein is the creature's creator, an earnestly romantic, idealistic, and well-educated young gentleman whose studies in "natural philosophy" (p. 40) and chemistry evolve from "a fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature" (p. 41). However, it is a tribute to the power of Shelley's work—a masterpiece—that it has spawned a parody, no matter how skewed, much as Frankenstein's creation parodies the divine creation of Adam.
There is some logic, too, in the popular tendency to conflate the monster and his creator under the name of "Frankenstein." As the novel progresses, Frankenstein and his monster vie for the role of protagonist. We are predisposed to identify with Frankenstein, whose character is admired by his virtuous friends and family and even by the ship captain who rescues him, deranged by his quest for vengeance, from the ice floe. He is a human being, after all. However, despite his philanthropic ambition to "banish disease from the human frame and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death" (p. 42), Frankenstein becomes enmeshed in a loathsome pursuit that causes him to destroy his own health and shun his "fellow-creatures as if...guilty of a crime" (p. 57). His irresponsibility causes the death of those he loves most, and he falls under the control of his own creation.
The monster exhibits a similar kind of duality, arousing sympathy as well as horror in all who hear his tale. He demands our compassion to the extent that we recognize ourselves in his existential loneliness. Rejected by his creator and utterly alone, he learns what he can of human nature by eavesdropping on a family of cottage dwellers, and he educates himself by reading a few carefully selected titles that have fortuitously fallen across his path, among them Paradise Lost. "Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come?" (p. 131), he asks himself. Like Milton's Satan, who almost inadvertently becomes the compelling protagonist of Paradise Lost, the monster has much to recommend him.
Despite his criminal acts, the monster's self-consciousness and his ability to educate himself raise the question of what it means to be human. It is difficult to think of the monster as anything less than human in his plea for understanding from Frankenstein: "Believe me, Frankenstein: I was benevolent; my soul glowed with love and humanity; but am I not alone, miserably alone? You, my creator, abhor me; what hope can I gather from your fellow-creatures, who owe me nothing? they spurn and hate me" (p. 103). When his anonymous acts of kindness toward the cottage dwellers are repaid with baseless hatred, we have to wonder whether it is the world he inhabits, as opposed to something innate, that causes him to commit atrocities. Nonetheless, he retains a conscience and an intense longing for another kind of existence.
By their own accounts, both Frankenstein and the monster begin with benevolent intentions and become murderers. The monster may seem more sympathetic because he is by nature an outsider, whereas Frankenstein deliberately removes himself from human society. When Frankenstein first becomes engrossed in his efforts to create life, collecting materials from the dissecting room and slaughterhouse, he breaks his ties with friends and family, becoming increasingly isolated. His father reprimands him for this, prompting Frankenstein to ask himself what his single-minded quest for knowledge has cost him, and whether or not it is morally justifiable. Looking back, he concludes that it is not, contrary to his belief at the time: "if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved; Caesar would have spared his country; America would have been discovered more gradually; and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed" (p. 56). Passages such as this one suggest the possibility that Shelley is writing about the potentially disastrous consequences of not only human ambition, but also a specific kind of masculine ambition. The point of view here may be that of a nineteenth-century woman offering a feminist critique of history.
Far more than the simple ghost story a teenaged Shelley set out to write, Frankenstein borrows elements of Gothic horror, anticipates science fiction, and asks enduring questions about human nature and the relationship between God and man. Modern man is the monster, estranged from his creator—sometimes believing his own origins to be meaningless and accidental, and full of rage at the conditions of his existence. Modern man is also Frankenstein, likewise estranged from his creator—usurping the powers of God and irresponsibly tinkering with nature, full of benign purpose and malignant results.Frankenstein is both a criticism of humanity, especially of the human notions of technical progress, science, and enlightenment, and a deeply humanistic work full of sympathy for the human condition.
ABOUT MARY SHELLEY
Mary Shelley was born in London in 1797, the daughter of two well-known writers and radical political thinkers. Her mother, the proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, died ten days after Shelley was born. Shelley grew up worshiping her father, William Godwin (to whom Frankenstein is dedicated). Emotionally distant, he nonetheless oversaw her education and held high expectations for her intellectual development and literary ambition. It was through her father that Mary met the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, then a young married man who admired Godwin's work and frequently visited their home. Mary was sixteen and Shelley was still married (and his wife pregnant) when they eloped to the continent to escape Godwin's wrath, taking with them Claire Clairmont, Mary's stepsister.
Much of Mary Shelley's life was marked by tumult and tragedy, giving her ample material for the themes of abandonment and loss that pervade Frankenstein. A daughter was born prematurely in 1815 and died a few days later. In 1816, when Mary, Percy, and Claire were neighbors of the poet Lord Byron in Switzerland, Byron proposed that for entertainment the assembled company, which included Byron's personal physician, each write "a ghost story." Mary began to writeFrankenstein. That same year, her half-sister, Fanny Imlay, committed suicide. A few months later, Percy's wife, Harriet, drowned. In December 1816, Mary and Percy were married in London. They had four children altogether, only one of whom survived childhood, before Percy Shelley drowned at sea in 1822.
During her lifetime, Mary Shelley wrote several novels, including Frankenstein (1818) and The Last Man (1826). She collected Percy Shelley's posthumous poetry and wrote biographical essays as well as numerous articles and stories for magazines. She died in London in 1851, at age fifty-three.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
FOR FURTHER REFLECTION
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