Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.
"It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs."
The novel opens with Captain Walton on a ship sailing north of the Arctic Circle. Walton's ship becomes ice-bound, and as he contemplates his isolation and paralysis, he spots a figure traveling across the ice on a dog sledge. This is Victor Frankenstein's creature. Soon after he sees the ill Victor Frankenstein himself and invites him onto his boat. The narrative of Walton is a frame narrative that allows for the story of Victor to be related. At the same time, Walton's predicament is symbolically appropriate for Victor's tale of displaced passion and brutalism.
Victor takes over telling the story here. Curious and intelligent from a young age, he is self taught by masters of Medieval alchemy, reading such authors as Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus, and shunning modern Enlightenment teachings of natural science (see also Romanticism and the Middle Ages). He leaves his beloved family in Geneva, Switzerland to study in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, Germany where he is first introduced to modern science. In a moment of inspiration, combining his new found knowledge of natural science with that of the alchemy dreams of his old masters, Victor discovers the means by which inanimate matter can be imbued with life. With great drive and fervor, he sets about constructing a creature perhaps intended as a companion from various materials, including cadavers.
He intends the creature to be beautiful, but when the creature awakens, Victor is disgusted. It has yellow, watery eyes, rough stitching, and large size. Victor finds this revolting and although the creature expressed him no harm (in fact it grins at him and reaches his hands out innocently to his creator), Victor runs out of the room in terror whereupon the creature disappears. Overwork causes Victor to take ill for several months. After recovering, in about a year's time, he receives a letter from home informing him of the murder of his youngest brother William. He departs for Switzerland at once.
Near Geneva, Victor catches a glimpse of the creature in a thunderstorm among the rocky boulders of the mountains, and is convinced it killed William. Upon arriving home he finds Justine, the family's beloved maid, framed for the murder. Despite Victor's feelings of overwhelming guilt, he does not tell anyone about his horrid creation and Justine is convicted and executed. To recover from the ordeal, Victor goes hiking into the mountains where he encounters his "cursed creation" again, this time atop a glacier.
The creature converses with Victor and tells him his story, speaking in strikingly eloquent language. He describes his feelings first of confusion, then rejection and hate. He explains how he learned to talk by studying a poor peasant family through a crack in the wall. He performs in secret many kind deeds for this family, but in the end, they drive him away when they see his appearance. He gets the same response from any human who sees him. The creature confesses that it was indeed he who killed William and framed Justine, and that he did so out of revenge. But now, the creature only wants one thing; he begs Victor to create a female companion for him so that he may have companionship.
At first, Victor agrees, but later, he tears up the half-made companion in disgust and madness. In retribution, the creature kills Clerval, Victor's best friend. On Victor's wedding night, the creature kills his wife. Victor now becomes the hunter: he pursues the creature into the Arctic ice, though in vain. Near exhaustion, he is stranded when an iceberg breaks away, carrying him out into the ocean. At that moment, Captain Walton's ship arrives and he is rescued.
Walton assumes the narration again, describing a temporary recovery in Victor's health, allowing him to relate his extraordinary story. However Victor's health soon fails, and he dies. Unable to convince his shipmates to continue north and bereft the charismatic Frankenstein, Walton is forced to turn back towards England under the threat of mutiny. Finally, the creature boards the ship and finds Victor dead, and greatly laments what he has done to his maker. He vows to commit suicide by burning himself on a funeral pyre, exulting in the agony of the flames, and leaves the ship by leaping through the cabin window to an ice raft.
Genesis
"How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?"
During the snowy summer of 1816, the "Year Without A Summer," the world was locked in a long cold volcanic winter caused by the eruption of Tambora in 1815. In this terrible year, the then Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, age 19, and her husband-to-be Percy Bysshe Shelley, visited Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva in Switzerland. After reading Fantasmagoriana, an anthology of German ghost stories, Byron challenged the Shelleys and his personal physician John William Polidori each to compose a story of their own. Mary conceived an idea after she fell into a waking dream or nightmare during which she saw "the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together." This was the germ of Frankenstein. Byron managed to write just a fragment based on the vampire legends he heard while travelling the Balkans, and from this Polidori created The Vampyre (1819), the progenitor of the romantic vampire literary genre. Thus, the Frankenstein and vampire themes were created from that single circumstance.
Mary Shelley completed her writing in May 1817, and Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus was first published on 1 January 1818 by the small London publishing house of Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones. It was issued anonymously, with a Preface written for Mary by Percy Bysshe Shelley and with a dedication to philosopher William Godwin, her father. It was published in an edition of just 500 copies in three volumes, the standard "triple-decker" format for 19th century first editions. The novel had been previously rejected by Percy Bysshe Shelley's publisher Charles Ollier and by Byron's publisher John Murray.
Critical reception of the book was mostly unfavourable, compounded by confused speculation as to the identity of the author, which was not well disguised. Walter Scott wrote that "Upon the whole, the work impresses us with a high idea of the author's original genius and happy power of expression", but most reviewers thought it "a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity" (Quarterly Review).
Despite the reviews, Frankenstein achieved an almost immediate popular success. The second edition of Frankenstein was published on 11 August 1823 in two volumes (by G. and W. B. Whittaker) and this time credited Mary Shelley as the author.
(Wikipedia)
This book is printed on 24lb parchment paper in a beautiful gothic 'Frankenstein' font. The head of each chapter is decorated with text embellishments, as are the head and foot of each page. The book is bound with metal screws. The book measures approx. 8.5" x 11".
