The name of Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein is far-famed; but the book itself, overshadowed perhaps by its literary associations, seems to have withdrawn into the vast library of famous works that are more often mentioned than read.  The very fact that the name is often bestowed on the monster instead of his creator seems to suggest that many are content to accept Mrs. Shelley’s “hideous phantom” on hearsay evidence rather than encounter for themselves the terrors of his presence.  The story deserves a happier fate, for, if it be read in the spirit of willing surrender that a theme so impossible demands, it has still power momentarily “to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood and to quicken the beatings of the heart.”  The record of the composition of Frankenstein has been so often reiterated that it is probably better known than the tale itself.  In the summer of 1816—­when the Shelleys were the neighbours of Byron near Lake Geneva—­Byron, Shelley, Mary Shelley and Dr. Polidori, after reading some volumes of ghost stories[118] and discussing the supernatural and its manifestations, each agreed to write a ghost story.  It has been asserted that an interest in spectres was stimulated by a visit from “Monk” Lewis, but we have evidence that Mrs. Shelley was already writing her story in June,[119] and that Lewis did not arrive at the Villa Diodati till August 14th.[120] The conversation with him about ghosts took place four days later.  Shelley’s story, based on the experiences of his early youth, was never completed.  Byron’s fragment formed the basis of Dr. Polidori’s Vampyre.  Dr. Polidori states that his supernatural novel, Ernestus Berchtold, was begun at this time; but the skull-headed lady, alluded to by Mary Shelley as figuring in Polidori’s story, is disappointingly absent.  It was an argument between Byron and Shelley about Erasmus Darwin’s theories that brought before Mary Shelley’s sleepless eyes the vision of the monster miraculously infused by its creator with the spark of life. Frankenstein was begun immediately, completed in May, 1817, and published in 1818.

Mrs. Shelley has been censured for setting her tale in a clumsy framework, but she tells us in her preface that she began with the words:  “It was on a dreary night of November.”  This sentence now stands at the opening of Chapter IV., where the plot begins to grip our imagination; and it seems not unfair to assume that the introductory letters and the first four chapters, which contain a tedious and largely unnecessary account of Frankenstein’s early life, were written in deference to Shelley’s plea that the idea should be developed at greater length, and did not form part of her original plan.  The uninteresting student, Robert Walton, to whom Frankenstein, discovered dying among icebergs, tells his story, is obviously an afterthought.  If Mrs. Shelley had abandoned the awkward contrivance of putting the narrative into the form of a dying man’s confession,