Mary Shelley
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
1818 · 205 pages
- Author
- Mary Shelley
- Edition
- First edition, in three volumes; this file is Volume I
- Published
- London, printed for Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones, Finsbury Square (printer: Macdonald and Son), 1818
- Pages
- 205
- File
- DjVu, 26.4 MB
- Text search
- yes
- Rights
- public domain
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About the book
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is Mary Shelley’s first novel. She began it during the wet summer of 1816 near Geneva, when Lord Byron proposed that each of his guests write a ghost story, and it was published anonymously in London in January 1818. She was twenty years old.
The book opens with letters from the explorer Robert Walton, who finds Victor Frankenstein half-dead on the Arctic ice and hears his story. This first volume covers Victor’s childhood in Geneva, his studies at Ingolstadt, the night he brings his creature to life and flees from it, the murder of his young brother William and the trial of the servant Justine, who is accused of the crime.
Often called the first true science-fiction novel, Frankenstein asks what a maker owes to what he makes, and it has shaped two centuries of thought about science and its limits. Mary Shelley revised the text substantially for the one-volume edition of 1831; this scan has the original 1818 version.
Contents
Tap a chapter to open the book there.
About this edition
Volume I of the first edition, printed for Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor and Jones in London in 1818 by Macdonald and Son. The author is not named: the volumes are dedicated to William Godwin, Mary Shelley’s father, and the unsigned preface was written by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The scan shows the copy in its original boards with a paper spine label, the bookplate of Willis Vickery and a bookseller’s catalogue entry for it pasted inside the front cover, and the publisher’s advertisements at the end. It has a text layer, but the OCR is rough in places.
How to read it
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Source
A scan from the Wikimedia Foundation's open projects. The book is in the public domain: free to read, download and share.