In brief
An explorer trapped in the Arctic ice takes on board a dying stranger, who tells him why he is there. As a student in Ingolstadt, Victor Frankenstein discovered how to give life to dead matter and built a man. The moment it opened its eyes he ran from it. Abandoned, the creature taught itself to speak and read by spying on a family in a cottage, asked for their friendship, and was beaten away. It found its maker, told him its story, and asked for one thing: a companion. Victor agreed, then broke his promise, and the creature destroyed everyone he loved. Maker and made chase each other to the pole.
The popular image, the bolted neck, the grunting giant, the mad scientist shouting “It’s alive”, comes from the stage and the cinema. The novel is stranger and sadder. Its monster is eloquent, its scientist is a coward, and its horror is less in the laboratory than in the bedroom where Victor lies down and tries to forget what he has done.
The argument
The title page of 1818 carries three lines from Paradise Lost, Adam speaking to God: “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me man?” That is the book’s question. Victor has made a being and owes it everything a parent or a god owes, and he gives it nothing, not even a name. The creature says so to his face on the glacier: “I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed” (vol. 2, ch. 2). Then comes the sentence the whole novel turns on: “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.”
Shelley’s father William Godwin, to whom the book is dedicated, had argued that character is made by circumstance, and that a just society would produce just people. The creature is that argument as a person. He is not born wicked. He saves a drowning girl and is shot for it. He gathers firewood in secret for the poor cottagers he watches. He becomes a murderer only after every human being he approaches has screamed, struck him or fled. The novel never excuses his crimes, and he does not excuse them himself, but it puts the first fault plainly with the maker who walked away.
It is also a warning about a certain kind of ambition. Victor works alone, in secret, for two years, cut off from family and friends, and calls his obsession noble. “Learn from me,” he tells Walton, “how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge” (vol. 1, ch. 3). The point is not that science is evil. It is that knowledge pursued in isolation, with no thought for what it will make or who must live with it, ends in ruin. Walton, who has the same hunger, is the reader’s test case: at the end he listens, and turns his ship back.
The shape of the book
The novel is built like a set of nested boxes. Walton’s four letters to his sister in England open it (Letter 1). Inside them is Victor’s story, told to Walton aboard ship. Inside that, at the very centre, is the creature’s own story, told to Victor in a hut above the glacier at Montanvert and running for most of the second volume. Inside that again is the history of the De Lacey family and of Safie, the daughter of a Turkish merchant and a Christian Arab, whom Felix loves, and whose story the creature overhears and passes on. Then the boxes close in reverse order, and Walton’s journal takes up the end.
The effect is that every judgement passes through more than one witness. We hear the creature only as Victor remembers him, and Victor only as Walton writes him down. The structure also puts the creature’s voice where it cannot be ignored, at the heart of the book and in the longest uninterrupted speech in it.
In the 1818 edition the three volumes fall cleanly. Volume I is Victor’s youth, the making, and the first deaths: his brother William murdered and the servant Justine executed for it (vol. 1, ch. 7). Volume II is the creature’s tale and his demand for a mate (vol. 2, ch. 9). Volume III is the broken promise and its consequences: the half-made female torn apart in the Orkneys (vol. 3, ch. 3), Clerval strangled, Elizabeth killed on her wedding night (vol. 3, ch. 6), and the pursuit north.
The voices
Victor narrates in the high Romantic style, full of exclamations, mountains and sighs, and much of his eloquence is self-pity. The famous chapter of the making is brief on method and long on feeling. “It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils” (vol. 1, ch. 4), it begins, and within a page the man who chose the features “as beautiful” is recoiling from “his yellow skin” that “scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath”. He confesses: “I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished.” He flees into the streets, quoting Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner on the man who walks on and dares not turn his head.
The creature’s voice is the book’s great surprise. Self-taught from Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives and The Sorrows of Werter, found in a leather portmanteau in the woods (vol. 2, ch. 7), he argues better than his maker. He moves from pleading to accusation to command in a single scene: “You are my creator, but I am your master;—obey!” (vol. 3, ch. 3). When he reads Victor’s laboratory journal and learns how he was made, his cry is the oldest one in literature: “Hateful day when I received life!” (vol. 2, ch. 7).
The settings speak too. Shelley had crossed the Alps and seen the Mer de Glace, and she puts her two great confrontations in the sublime landscapes the Romantics loved: the glacier below Mont Blanc and the Arctic ice. Nature in this book is vast, beautiful and indifferent. It restores Victor briefly and then gives the creature a place to hide.
The science
Shelley wrote at a moment when life itself seemed open to experiment. The 1818 preface opens by noting that the central event “has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence”, meaning Erasmus Darwin. Luigi Galvani had made dead frogs’ legs twitch with electricity, and his nephew Giovanni Aldini had made the corpse of a hanged man grimace and raise a hand in London in 1803. Chemistry, led in England by Humphry Davy, promised to reveal the elements of everything. Victor’s teacher Waldman gives a lecture on how modern chemists “penetrate into the recesses of nature” that sets him on his course (vol. 1, ch. 2).
Shelley is careful never to say how it is done. Victor refuses to tell Walton, for fear he will repeat the experiment, and the book’s interest is never in mechanism. In the 1818 text electricity enters only through the boyhood scene of a tree blasted by lightning and his father’s lesson on it (vol. 1, ch. 1). The word galvanism appears only in 1831, in the introduction and the revision. That restraint is one reason Brian Aldiss could call it the first science fiction novel: it imagines what a discovery would do to people, not how the machine would work.
The people
Victor Frankenstein
Gifted, proud, warm to his family and utterly unable to take responsibility. When Justine is tried for William’s murder, Victor knows who did it and says nothing, for fear of being thought mad, and lets her die. Every death after that follows from his silence or his broken word. He sees himself as a tragic hero; the book lets us see him as something smaller.
The creature
He is never named. Victor calls him wretch, dæmon, fiend and monster; the habit of calling him “Frankenstein” came later, from the theatre and the films. He is enormous, fast, able to live on berries and endure cold, and capable of tenderness, reasoning and remorse. At the end, standing over his maker’s body, he grieves for him.
Elizabeth, Clerval and Justine
Victor’s circle is made of good people who suffer for him. In the 1818 text Elizabeth is his cousin, “the only child of his deceased sister”, raised with him and intended as his wife from childhood (vol. 1, ch. 1). Henry Clerval is the friend he might have been, a lover of poetry and of people, who nurses him through fever and dies for being near him. Justine Moritz is the servant executed for a crime she did not commit, the first victim of Victor’s secret.
Robert Walton
The frame narrator is a second Victor: an explorer driven by the glory of discovery, who complains in his second letter, “I have no friend, Margaret” (Letter 2). He finds one in Victor and loses him within weeks. Unlike Victor, he finally listens to the people around him. There is a last irony: the dying Victor, for all his warnings, urges the crew to go on, and it is the crew Walton heeds.
How it was made
In the summer of 1816, the cold, wet “year without a summer” that followed the eruption of Tambora, Mary Godwin, eighteen years old, was living near Lake Geneva with Percy Shelley, their baby son William and her stepsister Claire Clairmont, near Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati. Kept indoors by rain, they read German ghost stories, and Byron proposed that each of them write one. Byron and Percy soon gave up. Byron’s doctor John Polidori produced the tale that became The Vampyre (1819). Mary’s took her the best part of a year and became a novel.
The story had grief behind it. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died of an infection days after giving birth to her. Her own first child, born early in 1815, lived less than two weeks, and her journal records a dream that the baby came back to life. The murdered child in the novel is called William, the name of her father and of her son.
Percy read the manuscript closely and made many changes, a few thousand words in a novel of about seventy thousand, as the surviving notebooks show; he also wrote the 1818 preface. The book appeared anonymously in three volumes on 1 January 1818, dedicated to Godwin, and many readers assumed Percy was the author.
1818 and 1831
Shelley revised the novel for a one-volume edition in 1831 and added the introduction that gave the world its origin story: the ghost-story contest, and a waking vision of “the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together”. There she bid “my hideous progeny go forth and prosper”. The revisions are real. In 1831 Elizabeth is no longer Victor’s cousin but a foundling adopted from a poor Italian family, which removes a near-incestuous marriage, and Victor’s ruin is presented more as fate than as choice. Modern scholars often prefer the 1818 text as closer to the book Shelley first wrote, and that is the text quoted and linked here. Many popular editions still print 1831; others now print 1818.
Readers and critics
Walter Scott reviewed it warmly in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1818, believing it to be Percy’s. John Wilson Croker in the Quarterly Review found it horrible, disgusting and absurd. The book sold modestly, but in 1823 a stage version, Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein, was a hit in London; Godwin arranged a second edition, now under Mary Shelley’s name, to catch the success.
Its modern reputation dates from the 1970s. Brian Aldiss, in Billion Year Spree (1973), made it the origin of science fiction. Ellen Moers, in Literary Women (1976), read it as a birth myth written by a young woman who had already lost a child, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), read the creature through Milton and through women’s exclusion. Others have read it as a story about revolution, race, disability or the ethics of research.
Afterlives
Peake’s play gave the creature its muteness, and Edison’s studio made the first film in 1910. James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), with Boris Karloff, fixed the image the world knows: the flat head and bolts were Universal’s invention, not Shelley’s. Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935) brought the female to life at last. Hammer’s films from 1957, Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974), Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), Danny Boyle’s National Theatre production (2011), in which Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller alternated the two leads, and Guillermo del Toro’s film of 2025 have kept it in constant revival. Novelists have answered it: Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things (1992), Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013), Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein (2019).
How to read it
- Know which text you have. If the introduction about the ghost-story contest is printed, it is 1831. Read 1818 if you can, and the 1831 introduction afterwards.
- Read the creature’s narrative in one sitting. Volume II, chapters 3 to 8, is the core of the book and its finest writing.
- Distrust Victor. Notice how often he is ill, faints or falls silent at the moment he should act.
- Watch the frame. Walton’s last pages are more than an epilogue. His choice to turn back is the book’s answer to Victor.
- Keep Milton nearby. The creature reads Paradise Lost as true history, and sees himself as both Adam and Satan.
Read next
- John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667). The creature’s own textbook, and the source of the epigraph.
- William Godwin, Caleb Williams (1794). Her father’s novel of pursuit between two men bound by a secret.
- Mary Shelley, The Last Man (1826). Her later novel of a plague that ends humanity, as bleak as anything she wrote.
- Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Another scientist who makes his own double and cannot control it.
- Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005). Made beings who are not treated as people, told quietly from inside.