A Monstrous Halloween Tale: 190 Years Later, Mary Shelley Finally Gets Her Due

Halloween may be my favorite holiday and Frankenstein one of my favorite books.

But there is a dirty little secret about the masterwork written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in her late teens and first published anonymously in 1818 as Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus, and a colleague, Charlie Robinson, can now tell the tale after studying Shelley’s original notebooks at Oxford University’s venerable Bodleian Library:

Shelley’s husband, famed English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, deleted many words and added at least 4,000 to 5,000 words of his own to the 72,000-word novel, which is considered the first work of science fiction and remains the most popular book in that genre nearly 200 years on.

Robinson, an English professor at the University of Delaware, has atoned for Percy Shelley’s sins in The Original Frankenstein, published this month in England by the Bodleian but not yet available in the U.S.

The enduring popularity of Mary Shelley’s monster can be attributed to the quality of the book and the effects of Hollywood on the popular imagination.

“The novel subsumes the basic Western myths about the consequences of the pursuit of knowledge,” Robinson says. “It’s a short novel, and states the murder as fact, and with its simplicity and clarity, there is a fable-like quality to the narrative. It’s also about cautionary science, revolutionary theories, family dynamics and responsibility to one’s children.”

There is a spooky element to Robinson’s research: The Shelleys apparently visited the same Clarendon Building at the Bodleian in 1815 where he toiled on the new edition, as did Victor Frankenstein and Henry Clerval in the novel itself.

With the assistance of Dr. Bruce Barker-Benfield, a senior assistant librarian at the Bodleian, Robinson inspected each leaf of the original manuscript and through a laborious examination of torn edges, glue residue, ink blots, pin holes, water marks and other minutiae, was able to determine the process through which Mary Shelley created Frankenstein.

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