Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus.

[SHELLEY, Mary Wollstonecraft]; Illustrated by Barry Moser.

$750.00

Item Number: 140651

Berkeley: University of California, 1984.

First edition of this illustrated edition of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece and “the most famous English horror novel” (Clute and Nicholls). Quarto, original cloth, illustrated. Signed by Barry Moser on the title page. Afterword by Joyce Carol Oates.

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.”