Frankenstein: How a Teenager Wrote the First Modern Monster

Frankenstein is one of the most famous stories ever written and one of the least read. Most people know the monster from films: flat head, bolts in the neck, a laboratory full of sparks. The novel Mary Shelley published in 1818 has none of that, and its creature is far stranger and sadder.

It was also written by a teenager. Shelley began the story at eighteen, during a holiday by Lake Geneva, and it was published anonymously when she was twenty. Her life, and the summer it began, explain a great deal about the book.

A daughter of radicals

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born in London on 30 August 1797. Her mother was the philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, who died shortly after the birth, and her father was the political philosopher William Godwin. She grew up surrounded by books and by her parents' ideas about reason, freedom and education.

In 1814, aged sixteen, she began a relationship with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was already married, and they left for France together with her stepsister, Claire Clairmont. They married in December 1816, after his first wife's death.

The summer of 1816

In the summer of 1816 the couple stayed near Lake Geneva, close to Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati. It was the Year Without a Summer: the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia had cooled the climate, and the weather was cold and wet, keeping the group indoors.

Byron proposed that each of them write a ghost story. The guests included Byron's doctor, John Polidori, whose contribution became The Vampyre, published in 1819. Mary's idea came, as she later described it, in a waking dream of a scientist horrified by the thing he had brought to life. That image became Frankenstein.

The book itself

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was published in London on 1 January 1818, without its author's name. The subtitle refers to the Titan of Greek myth who stole fire from the gods for humanity and was punished for it, a warning about reaching too far.

The story is told in layers. It opens with letters from Robert Walton, an explorer sailing towards the North Pole, who rescues an exhausted man from the ice. That man is Victor Frankenstein, who tells Walton his story, and in the middle of it the creature tells his own. Three narrators, each ambitious and each alone, mirror one another.

A creature with no name

Shelley never gives the creature a name. Victor calls it a monster, a creature, a wretch. Frankenstein is the scientist, not the monster, a confusion so common that it has become part of the story's afterlife.

The creature is not the lumbering brute of the films. It learns to speak and read by secretly watching a family through a gap in a wall, and it reads Paradise Lost, Milton's poem about the fall of Satan and of Adam. It sees itself in both. Rejected by its maker and attacked by everyone who sees it, it turns violent only after it has been refused all companionship.

The science behind it

The novel is famously vague about how Victor brings his creature to life. But the writers at the Villa Diodati talked about galvanism, the experiments in which electric current made dead muscles twitch, and the book draws on that excitement about electricity and the boundary between life and death.

That is one reason critics take the book seriously as science fiction. The writer and critic Brian Aldiss argued that Frankenstein is the first true science fiction story, because its marvel comes from science rather than magic. Our reader's map of science fiction traces where the genre went next.

The 1831 revision

In 1831 Shelley published a revised edition under her own name, with a new introduction describing the ghost-story contest and her waking dream. The revisions made the tone more explicitly moral, presenting Victor as a man doomed by fate as much as by his choices.

Modern editions differ in which text they print, so it is worth checking which one you have. Readers who know only one version may be surprised by how much the two differ.

A life marked by loss

Shelley's life after Frankenstein was full of grief. Her son William died in 1819, and Percy Florence, born the same year, was the only one of her children to survive to adulthood. Percy Shelley drowned on 8 July 1822 when his boat sank in a storm off the Italian coast.

She kept writing. In 1826 she published The Last Man, a novel about a plague that wipes out humanity, an early work of apocalyptic fiction. She died in London on 1 February 1851, aged 53. It is hard to read Frankenstein's story of a creator who abandons what she made, and of a creature desperate for family, without thinking of her life.

Why it still matters

Two centuries on, Frankenstein is still the story people reach for when science moves faster than our sense of responsibility, from cloning to artificial intelligence. Its question is not whether we can create life, but what we owe to what we create.

For readers new to it, the novel is short and easy to find. It sits naturally next to H. G. Wells's novels of the 1890s; our guide to The Time Machine is a good next step, and our list of classic science fiction goes further.