Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus.

[SHELLEY, Mary Wollstonecraft].

Item Number: 139850

London: Printed for Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones, 1818.

First edition of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece and “the most famous English horror novel” (Clute and Nicholls); one of only 500 copies printed. Octavo, three volumes bound in full polished calf with gilt titles and stamping to the spine, all edges marbled. Association copy, from the library of great London publishers Rudolph and Adolphus Ackermann with their ownership signatures to the third and fourth endpaper each volume, “R. Ackermann” and “Adolphus Ackermann 1827.” Rudolph Ackermann Sr. published Mary Shelley’s story “Lacy De Vere” as an anonymous work in the 1827 edition of his literary annual, Forget Me Not. It was their first and only partnership (although Mary Shelley wrote to him once more a few years later pitching another contribution). With Adolphus Ackermann’s ownership signature being dates 1827, this copy was likely given this copy of Frankenstein by his new author, or she may have given it directly to his teenage son, Adolphus who, at the time, was only slightly younger than Shelley. In near fine condition. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. Without half-titles or advertisements. An exceptional example of this exceedingly rare cornerstone of English literature, with fine provenance and only a handful appearing at auction.

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.”