If anyone had asked me before last week if I had read Frankenstein I would have replied “yes” as I was certain that I had done so although many years ago. Yet when I started reading a few days ago it became clear that I had never read this thoroughly enjoyable book before as it was completely unfamiliar. I have of course seen several of the largely terrible films and memories of those must have blurred my recollections but the book is so very different to the various ‘adaptations’ and is well written especially bearing in mind this was the twenty year old Shelley’s first work of fiction. I was particularly keen to read the book this week as next month I will be reading the first four Penguin books to mark ninety years of Penguin and the first of those is Ariel by André Maurois, which is his biography of Mary’s husband the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

I think a lot of people know the story of how Frankenstein came to be written, but if you don’t then Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin as she was then, was away in Geneva in 1816 with her soon to be husband, whom she had run away with at the age of sixteen despite the fact that he was already married, she was eighteen by now. Also in the group was Lord Byron and his private doctor John William Polidori and there came an evening with poor weather so they were ‘trapped’ inside and it was suggested that each person present should write a horror story. Byron started a tale but didn’t get very far, it was later published as ‘a fragment’, Shelley wrote what would ultimately be five short ghost stories, Polidori didn’t get anywhere with his own story, but would later pick up Byron’s fragment and write ‘The Vampyre’, the first ‘modern’ vampire story, published almost eighty years before Bram Stoker’s classic, Mary of course started Frankenstein. Two years later in 1818 it was finished and published, by which time Mary and Percy were married, at the end of 1816 just days after the suicide of his wife.

It was immediately apparent to me that I hadn’t read the book before from the unfamiliar opening, which consists of four letters from Robert Walton to his sister Margaret as he embarks on an Arctic voyage from Archangel in northern Russia to attempt to reach the North Pole. Not where I expected the book to begin. In the fourth letter however there was a hint of what I had anticipated.

a strange sight suddenly attracted our attention and diverted our solicitude from our own situation. We perceived a low carriage, fixed on a sledge and drawn by dogs, pass on towards the north, at the distance of half a mile; a being which had the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature, sat in the sledge and guided the dogs. We watched the rapid progress of the traveller with our telescopes until he was lost among the distant inequalities of the ice.

Undoubtedly it’s the monster, but what is he doing on a dog sledge in the high Arctic? The next morning another sledge is spotted, this time in a bad way with just one dog still living and trapped on a shrinking ice floe. Its badly frostbitten occupant is encouraged to board the ship and collapses soon afterwards, however as he slowly recovers he starts to tell his story to Walton, who each evening writes down what the stranger has told him, eventually revealing his name as Victor Frankenstein and how he came to create the creature they had spotted earlier.

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.

How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.

The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.

This is where I struggled somewhat with the plot as Frankenstein simply runs away into the night rather than confronting and possibly destroying his creation which would have been the most logical outcome, although shortening the book somewhat. Instead when he returns to his lodging he discovers the monster is gone and he doesn’t see or hear of it again for the next two years. For a year of that time the creature improbably lives undetected in a small room attached to a cottage occupied by probably the least curious family imaginable for it never occurs to them to go round the back of the house and look at the outbuilding and its eight foot tall inhabitant. We are further asked to believe that just by observing this family he learns from scratch to not only understand their spoken language but also to read with no tuition. However if we discard my objections to this plot device then when the tale is picked up again the creature has found the Frankenstein home in Geneva having walked from Ingolstadt (roughly halfway between Munich and Nuremburg) a distance of some 400 miles (650km) although again it is not clear how he has managed this feat. To say that the crossing of paths between the creator and his creation after all this time does not go well is an understatement but it is from here that the book becomes more enjoyable again leading up to the fateful denouement on the Arctic Sea.

If you haven’t read Frankenstein then you should, there is a lot more going on both in the plotting and social commentary, which is only appropriate from the daughter of radical thinker and novelist William Godwin. My copy is from the new Penguin Vintage Collector’s Classics series, which included this book in its first ten titles published in March 2025. They are a lovely series of books with foil embossed covers and marbled end papers along with matching sprayed edges. The first ten titles were split evenly between ‘Gothic’ and ‘Romantic’ novels and a great selection they are too.