Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus first appeared in print 200 hundred years ago, when the author was only 20. Since 1818, her boundary-breaking novel has become the most famous “Gothic” and Romantic-era text ever written, one of the founding works of science fiction, the inspiration for countless (if often “loose”) adaptations for the stage, film, and other media, and the source of a metaphor—the very name “Frankenstein”—that has come to designate several of the issues now raised by the modern sciences of artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, which it foresaw with astonishing prescience.
For details on our upcoming conference, “Frankenstein: Then and Now, 1818-2018,″ head over to Verso.
AND for a limited time, you can see our 1831 edition (the first to include an illustration of the monster) on view in the Library Exhibition Hall.
Frontispiece from the 1831 third edition of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. The engraving on the frontispiece, produced by William Chevalier from a drawing by the British artist Theodor von Holst (1810–1844), is the first known visualization of Victor Frankenstein and his creature attached to an edition of the novel itself. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, London, 1831. On view in the Library Exhibition Hall at The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.