Frankenstein: Mary Shelley, 1818
1818 · book
Frankenstein was published anonymously on 1 January 1818. Its author was Mary Shelley, who had begun it at the age of eighteen during a cold and sunless summer at a house by Lake Geneva, where the company had been kept indoors by weather caused by a volcanic eruption on the other side of the world. Lord Byron proposed that each of them write a ghost story. Hers was the only one that lasted.
The novel tells of Victor Frankenstein, a student who assembles a living being from dead matter and then, appalled by what he has made, walks away from it. The creature is not the grunting figure of the films. It teaches itself to read, argues its case with precision and asks its maker for the one thing it has never had, which is company. The horror of the book is not the laboratory, it is the abandonment.
Mary Shelley grew up among radical thinkers and had lost her mother, the writer Mary Wollstonecraft, days after being born. She wrote at a moment when experiments with electricity on dead tissue were being demonstrated in public and when the question of what science should be allowed to attempt was newly urgent. A revised edition appeared in 1831 with her name on it.
Frankenstein is usually called the first science fiction novel, because the creature is made by method rather than magic and the author asks what follows from that. Two centuries later it is still the story people reach for whenever a new technology arrives without a plan for what to do with the result, and the common habit of calling the creature Frankenstein has quietly made the point of the book, since the responsibility does belong to the man whose name it bears.