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This is an apocalyptic end of the world book. I had not realised this genre existed in the 19th century, but it turns out that there was a whole run of books on this theme at the time. Indeed, Shelley was criticised for being too close to the 1805 *Last Man*.

So, basically, it is the story of the whole world being wiped out by plague. Nowadays there would have been zombies too. I believe there are in the 2008 movie version.

There’s a lot of flowery early 19th century prose about the coming of Death, the great leveller, who takes kings and paupers, against whom no man can fight and who no door can bar.

It is also a roman a clef which features Byron (the passionate, but unprincipled Lord Raymond who runs off to free Greece from the Turks) and her husband (Adrian, Earl of Windsor who is the son of the last king of England and is motivated by republican principles). The narrator is based on Shelley herself - Lionel Verney, the Last Man.

There is a lot of debate about Burkean philosophy, the French revolution and romanticism, all pressing concerns of the 1820s and assumed to still be in the future. OTOH, if I were reading this in the 1970s the whole debate about freeing Greece from the Turks would seem eerily prescient.

There is very little of what we would nowdays call SF. There’s almost no emphasis on technology, except that at one point they fly across the country in a hot air balloon. The assumption is that the future looks pretty much like then - America is a frontier, the Pope is a significant power, the nobility are a significant political force, and the world is agricultural. What is important to her is the debate about philosophy.
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I read *Frankenstein* a while back when friends were in it (most convincing chemistry between the leads ever). My sole recollection is of an endless, white Artic waste.

Having reread it, this is because the endless, frozen wastelands feature prominently. That’s where the action opens and where it concludes.

And I’d forgotten how complicated and, indeed, post-modern it it. The narrative is, at some points, at four removes. The narrator writes to his sister about what Frankenstein told him that the monster told him. How very unreliable. How consistently the novel reminds us that it is a fiction.

I was also aware of how much more I would get out of it if I did the right readings. It would make a big difference if I read the literature that the monster takes as his tools for learning - *The Sorrows of Werther*, Plutarch’s *Lives* and Milton’s *Paradise Lost*. The novel obviously draws on the burgeoning romantic movement, which I don’t know enough about.

Obviously I am meant to admire Frankenstein’s love of the natural world, but for me it’s just one more really, seriously annoying thing about him. Stop moping about on the mountains and man up! Take responsibility for your actions!

I do like the whole nature/nurture issue. Is the monster evil because he is abandoned by his creator and all the others he meets? Or is he born evil, with it shown in his figure and face?

And, a less exalted question that springs to mind, why does his brother Ernest get to survive? Does Victor just not care enough about him for the monster to bother killing him?

Finally, I am deeply moved by her personal circumstances. Her mother, the radical feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, died as a result of her birth. She was married at sixteen, a mother at seventeen, and her daughter had died by the time she was eighteen. In her diary, she wrote: "Dream that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived."

She turned her personal, biological tragedy into a story about a man giving birth by fire and chemistry.
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26 November - Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)

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