Frankenstein

Written by an eighteen-year-old, this is the book that invented science fiction as we know it: a scientist makes a deliberate choice in a laboratory, and the consequences are moral, not magical. It asks who is responsible for a creation the maker refuses to love. Read it if you care about ambition, parenthood, exclusion, or every monster film you have ever seen.

1. 1

   Act 1

   The Night the Thing Opens Its Eyes

   The story opens with Robert Walton writing letters to his sister Mrs. Saville (Margaret) in England from St. Petersburg, describing his planned expedition to the North Pole and his ambition to discover a passage near the pole and the secret of the earth's magnetism. Then his crew spots something impossible: a gigantic figure driving a dog-sledge across the ice. The next morning they haul a dying, half-frozen stranger off a broken sledge, and that stranger, speaking English, melancholy and despairing, turns out to be Victor Frankenstein. He begins to talk, and his story swallows the book. Victor was born in Naples to a wealthy Genevese family, one of the most distinguished in the republic of Geneva. His mother Caroline discovered Elizabeth Lavenza, an orphan of a Milanese nobleman from a poor Italian cottage, during a charitable visit and adopted her as a 'pretty present' for Victor; Elizabeth became the adored center of his childhood, which he calls a paradise shared with her and his friend Henry Clerval. At thirteen he found a volume of Cornelius Agrippa, and though his father waved it off as 'sad trash' without explaining why, he devoured the occult sciences of Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus. Lightning destroyed an old oak near his home, a scientist explained electricity to him, and galvanism pulled him toward modern science. At seventeen, after his mother Caroline died of scarlet fever after nursing Elizabeth through the illness, he left Geneva for the University of Ingolstadt in Germany. There, over two years of obsessive study, he discovered the secret of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter and constructed an eight-foot-tall creature from body parts collected from charnel houses, dissecting rooms, and slaughterhouses (and graves). On a dreary November night, Victor brought the creature to life; the creature's yellow skin, watery eyes, and straight black lips horrified Victor, who fled his apartment in terror. In a dream, Victor embraced Elizabeth, who transformed into the corpse of his dead mother with worms in the shroud; he woke to find the creature standing by his bed, grinning and attempting to speak. It was gone by morning. The shock broke him into months of fever, nursed by Henry Clerval.

2. 2

   Act 2

   The Creature Learns to Hate

   The creature's own tale takes over. It woke with its senses confused, fled Victor's apartment, discovered fire in a forest (left by wandering beggars), learned to cook food and warm itself but burned itself, learning its pain; humans fled or attacked it because of its appearance. It took shelter in a hovel attached to a cottage inhabited by the De Lacey family—blind old man De Lacey, his son Felix, daughter Agatha, and the foreigner Safie—observing them through a chink in the wall. It learned their language as Felix taught Safie French, learned to read from papers in a coat taken from Victor's laboratory, and quietly helped them, hauling firewood at night and refusing to steal from people so poor. It read Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives, and the Sorrows of Werter (found in a leather portmanteau), and compared itself to Adam and to Satan, feeling that it was 'like Satan' because it was alone and miserable. Then came the gamble. While the blind old man sat alone, the creature spoke to him, and De Lacey, who could not see the horror, was kind. When Felix, Safie, and Agatha returned, they were horrified and Felix beat the creature with a stick, driving it away, never to return. Later it saved a young girl from drowning in a stream, but her companion (father), thinking the creature was attacking her, shot it in the shoulder. 'I am malicious because I am miserable,' it tells Victor on the Mer de Glace glacier, where Victor, grieving, has climbed Montanvert for solace and found his creation waiting. 'I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.' Near Plainpalais it encountered William Frankenstein in the woods, and when it learned the boy was a Frankenstein related to Victor, it strangled him and took the miniature portrait from his neck; it then planted the miniature in the sleeping Justine's pocket to frame her. Justine was tried, falsely confessed under pressure (despite protestations of innocence), and executed. Victor knew she was innocent but remained silent, tormented by the knowledge that his creature was the true murderer. Now the creature makes its demand: build a female as hideous as itself, and it will vanish to South America forever. Victor, terrified, agrees.

3. 3

   Act 3

   The Wedding-Night Promise

   Victor delays, then agrees to a tour with Henry Clerval through England and Scotland, slipping away secretly to work on the second creature. He leaves Henry Clerval in Perth, Scotland, and travels alone to one of the Orkney Islands, where he establishes a laboratory in a remote hut to create the female creature; as he works, he sees the original creature watching him through the window with a ghastly grin. Then doubt strangles him. He imagines the two creatures breeding, a race of monsters spreading over the earth, and tears the half-finished female to pieces in front of the window. The creature does not rage. It says, coldly: 'Remember, I shall be with you on your wedding-night.' After destroying the female creature, Victor rows out to sea and dumps the remains, then falls asleep in his boat and is blown off course to an Irish shore, where he is arrested on suspicion of murdering a man found strangled on the beach. He is taken before the magistrate Mr. Kirwin and shown the body, which is Henry Clerval's, murdered by the creature. Victor falls ill for two months in an Irish prison and is eventually released after the evidence proves he was on the Orkney Islands at the time of the murder; he returns to Geneva with his father. There he marries Elizabeth, carrying pistols and a dagger, certain the threat is aimed at him. On their wedding night at an inn in Evian, Victor patrols the house while Elizabeth retires. The creature was never coming for him. Victor hears a scream, and finds his bride strangled on the bed. His father Alphonse Frankenstein dies a few days after Elizabeth's murder, overcome by grief. With nothing left, Victor vows revenge and follows the creature's taunting clues across Europe and into Russia, out onto the Arctic ice.

4. 4

   Act 4

   Ice, Confession, and Fire

   The chase ends where the book began. Victor, picked up by Walton's ship in the Arctic, tells Walton his story and urges Walton's crew to continue their expedition. The crew refuses; they want to turn back. Victor dies aboard the ship from exhaustion and illness. Then Walton, writing to his sister, records what happens next. The creature appears aboard Walton's ship after Victor's death, mourns over Victor's body, and tells Walton he regrets his murders but was driven by misery, abandoned and spurned. 'I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on.' It quotes Milton against its maker: 'Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me Man, did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me?' Then it says it will depart to the farthest pole and immolate itself on a funeral pyre. It leaps from the cabin window onto an ice raft and disappears into the darkness, 'borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance.' Walton is left with a ship pointed home, a dead friend's story, and a monster who chose its own ending. The creature's final act is the only one nobody forced on it: grief, confession, and self-destruction, all in one leap into the dark.

• VVictor FrankensteinA brilliant, obsessive Genevese student who discovers how to animate dead matter and then abandons his creation in horror. His silence and broken promises cost him his brother, his friend, his bride, and finally his life on the Arctic ice.
• TThe CreatureVictor's eight-foot creation, articulate and tender until every human it meets beats, shoots, or flees it. Rejected by its maker and the world, it becomes the murderer it was made to look like, then mourns the man it destroyed.
• EElizabeth LavenzaThe Italian orphan adopted into the Frankenstein family as Victor's 'pretty present' and future wife. She is the gentle center of Victor's world, and the creature strangles her on her wedding night.
• HHenry ClervalVictor's childhood friend, the selfless nurse who pulls him back from fever twice. The creature strangles him on an Irish beach and leaves Victor to be accused of the murder.
• RRobert WaltonThe Arctic explorer whose letters frame the whole story; he wants glory at the pole the way Victor wanted glory in the lab. He listens to Victor's dying caution and turns his ship home.
• JJustine MoritzThe Frankenstein family's servant, framed for William's murder by the locket the creature planted in her pocket. She falsely confesses and is executed while Victor, the only one who knows the truth, stays silent.
• TThe De Lacey familyThe blind old man, Felix, Agatha, and Safie, whose cottage teaches the creature language, love, and books. Their terrified rejection of it, led by Felix's beating, is the wound that turns it against humanity.

Fire and lightning

The ice

Paradise Lost

The locket

The ending refuses to comfort anyone. Victor dies still demanding that Walton chase the creature, unreformed, unable to see that his own abandonment made the monster; his last speech is ambition talking past its own corpse. The creature, by contrast, gets the book's most human scene: it mourns its maker, admits regret, and sentences itself to a pyre at the pole. Some readers see repentance and suicide; others see a final performance, a murderer curating his own legend for the one man left listening. Either way, the creature ends the story with more self-knowledge than Victor ever shows. Walton turning back is the quiet verdict: the survivor of the two obsessions chooses his crew over the pole, which is the choice Victor never made. The last image, the creature borne away by the waves into darkness and distance, leaves judgment deliberately open, which is why the book still argues with itself two centuries on.

1. 1.Victor abandons the creature at first sight, yet the novel gives him the narrator's chair for most of it. Whose account do we trust, and how does the creature's counter-story change what we believe about the murders?

Anyone who has ever felt shut out, and anyone who has ever made something they were not ready to answer for. Readers of Gothic horror, early science fiction, and moral philosophy will find the original source of all of them here.

FAQ