Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus. [With] The Ghost-Seer! From the German of Schiller.

BY THE AUTHOR OF THE LAST MAN, Perkin Warbeck.

Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus. [With] The Ghost-Seer! From the German of Schiller.

London: Richard Bentley , 1839.

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"THE MOST FAMOUS ENGLISH HORROR NOVEL": First Bentley edition, later issue of Mary Shelley's masterpiece Frankenstein

First Bentley edition, later issue of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece and “the most famous English horror novel” (Clute and Nicholls). Octavo, bound in three quarters sheep over marbled boards with gilt stamping and ruling to the spine in six compartments within raised bands, morocco spine label lettered in gilt, engraved frontispiece dated 1831. Bound with The Ghost-Seer! From the German of Schiller [London: Richard Bentley, 1839]. Frankenstein was first published in 1818, with a second edition appearing in 1823. Bentley's edition, published in 1831 and incorporating extensive revisions by the author, was the third overall, the first illustrated edition, and the first edition in one volume. Copies are also noted with title-pages dated 1832 and 1836; this 1839 issue is usually described as the fourth. The engraved vignette title-page, not present here, is absent in other copies of the 1839 printing we have noted; it has not been established whether or not a letterpress series-title and advertisement leaf are also called for. In very good condition.

First published in 1818, Frankenstein is not only the "most famous English horror novel" but also, by some critics' reckoning, "the first genuine science fiction novel" (Clute & Nicholls, 1099). The circumstances of its composition are by now well known: 19-year old Mary was in Switzerland with Percy Shelley, Byron, and Byron's physician John Polidori on that famous evening in 1816 when the discussion turned to one of Shelley's favorite topics, the supernatural. Byron proposed that all members of the party write a romance or tale dealing with the subject. The resulting efforts were Polidori's The Vampyre, Byron's unfinished narrative about a vampire, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, "the most famous English horror novel… a defining model of the Gothic mode of fiction, and… the first genuine science fiction novel, the first significant rendering of the relations between mankind and science through an image of mankind's dual nature appropriate to an age of science" (Clute and Nicholls, Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 1099). At base, the novel is one of creative powers gone wrong-a subject of paramount concern to Mary Shelley, as her own mother had died as a result of Shelley's birth, and the year before writing Frankenstein, she lost her own daughter, Clare. Published anonymously on January 1st 1818 in a run of only 500 copies, the first edition included a preface written by Percy Shelley and a dedication to the author’s father, William Godwin. Its narrative, of a living being fashioned with materials found in "the dissecting room and the slaughter-house" and rejected by its maker, has now reached the same mythic cultural status as Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe. Yet the reviews at the time were mixed, with the Quarterly Review sufficiently morally outraged to wonder "whether the head or the heart of the author be the most diseased," while Walter Scott praised her “original genius” and “uncommon powers of poetic imagination.”